Riot deleted the top of the ladder this year. Patch 26.9 took every Master, Grandmaster, and Challenger account across six regions, including NA and EUW, dropped them back to Master with 0 LP, then raised the Challenger cutoff to 800 LP and the Grandmaster cutoff to 400. Korea was spared. Korea did not need the help. Within weeks, the same names were back on top of the LoL leaderboards, which says everything about skill level in competitive League of Legends.
How the League of Legends Ranking System Thins Out Every Tier
From Iron IV, the ranking system looks approachable: ten tiers, four divisions each until the apex, 100 LP to promote, 0 LP to demote. The cruelty is in the math underneath. A hidden matchmaking rating determines what your wins are worth; LP gains start at a baseline of 30 per game, and everything from Diamond up decays if you stop playing, costing Challenger players 75 LP per trigger.
Here is the whole ladder, using June 2026 solo queue data.
| Tier | Share of players | Reality check |
| Iron | 3.1% | Where placement games go to die |
| Bronze | 16% | Everyone claims they left years ago |
| Silver | 22% | Silver IV to Silver II: the great logjam |
| Gold | 24% | Gold IV alone holds 8.4% of players |
| Platinum | 18% | Where most climbs stall |
| Emerald | 12% | Added in 2023 to thin out Platinum |
| Diamond | 4% | Decay begins, 50 LP a trigger |
| Master | 0.84% | No divisions, one leaderboard |
| Grandmaster | 0.062% | 400 LP minimum after the reset |
| Challenger | 0.025% | 800 LP floor, a few hundred accounts |
Read that last row again. Challenger is one account in every four thousand, and the players below live there permanently.
Faker, Chovy, and the Pros Who Own the Top 20
Faker won his sixth world title in November, beating KT Rolster 3-2 in Chengdu to complete T1’s three-peat, and his contract runs to 2029. The Korean top 20 is a wall of pro accounts and their smurfs, and Faker has been a fixture there since before most Emerald players installed the game. Open the Korean leaderboard on a random morning and watch the LCK scrim in public.
Chovy is the other constant. Gen.G’s mid laner ran a 91% win rate across 22 games in this year’s LCK Cup with a 7.1 KDA, and by the numbers, he is still the best mid laner alive.
The board shifted hard this season. Gumayusi, the Worlds 2025 MVP, left T1 for Hanwha Life, and T1 rebuilt around 19-year-old Peyz. HLE promptly beat Bilibili Gaming 3-2 at MSI 2026 in Daejeon, with Zeus taking MVP of the final. The series turned on a bot lane head-to-head: Gumayusi against Viper, the man most of the esports scene calls the best ADC in the world.
The Streamers Who Reached Challenger Without a Pro Contract
Tyler1 is proof that the ladder is not gated behind a team house. He hit Challenger in all five roles, finishing with support in 2022 after more than 2,000 games as a top laner alone. He later moved to EUW and hit Grandmaster in 750 games across 36 days, which is less a climb than a hostage situation.
Agurin deserves the same billing and rarely gets it. He hit rank 1 in Korea as a jungler and peaked at 1,578 LP, on a server where the top 3 usually have a coach watching.
Then there is Baus, who made Challenger playing proximity Sion, a strategy half the community still calls griefing, and Caedrel, the retired jungler whose Los Ratones side pulled the most-watched match of the LEC Versus group stage. No coach, no analyst, no scripted meta pick. Just queue, and queue again.
From Uzi to Deft: The LoL Players Who Set the Bar
Every ladder has ghosts. Uzi became the second inductee into Riot’s Hall of Legends after a decade as the most feared bot laner alive, and he never won Worlds. People still argue about him for that reason.
Deft did win one, dragging DRX from fourth seed to the Summoner’s Cup in 2022, and he is not retired, just serving military service and renting a practice room to keep his mechanics sharp. Smeb, the best top laner in the world in 2016, said so on stream.
The rest of that class still sets the bar. Mata and Imp went 6-0 through the 2014 group stage with Samsung White. Doinb swept G2 for the 2019 title with FPX. Xiaohu is the only player to win a major international tournament in two positions: top at MSI 2021, mid at MSI 2022.
What It Actually Costs to Climb the Ladder
The uncomfortable truth about the ranked ladder is volume. Nobody reaches the highest ranks on talent and 40 games. Tyler1 needed thousands. Pros play hundreds of ranked splits. Your MMR sets your LP gains, a dodge in Master and above counts as a full loss, and reaching 100 LP only means the next tier starts at zero.
Volume is why almost everyone in high elo keeps a second account, somewhere to learn jungle without feeding their main’s rank into the dirt. Some players build that alt from scratch over a few hundred games. Others skip the placement slog by picking one up from a marketplace like igitems and queueing the same night. Both roads end in the same place: more games played, more mistakes made faster.
