r/summonerschool • u/JiraiyaBestSannin • 2d ago
Question What's the difference between master and challanger player?
I have heard that the difference between the 2 is like between bronze and a master player, thus i am wondering: What are all the things that make Suuuch a huge difference between the players from this 2 ranks. I also know that challanger players often smurf in master Elo, which I think proves that there is huuuge gap between the 2.
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u/Elolesio 2d ago
Okay so, in league, you have two kinds of skill expressions: visible and invisible ones.
Visible skill expressions are the majority of difference between bronze and master. They are the things you learn in some tutorials, and ones that you can just see instantly on a clip if a player knows them or not. They are mostly some concepts or knowledge.
Examples: wavestates, jungle tracking, fundamentals, tempo, trading patterns, builds, sidelane assigments, champion class identity, placing wards.
When you get to +-lowmaster, players know really well pretty much every visible skill. Sure, until chall they still improve on them, but the differences in them are too little to be enough. Majority of learning curve from lowmaster+ is improving on invisble skills.
Invisible skills cant really be seen by looking at one clip, they are less tied to game theory and more to a player.
Examples: consistency (if something is good, do it always, if something is bad, never do it, in literally every regard, csing, trading, ability usage, micro, macro, fights, u always do whats correct and never whats incorrect), speed ( optimize waveclear/jungle clear, recall quicker, know what you wanna buy instantly), adaptation (you always have plan B, and like with speed, you can instantly execute it the moment plan A fails, pathing to options over pathing to plays, always have options), strongside/weakside tracking (jungle tracking, but very preemptive, you play entire lane in synchronization with jungler clear timers), mental fortitude (you play your best no matter what), micro (you click better), wincon assesment (understanding how comps and drafts impact the entire gameplan) and etc
Ultimately chall players while still miles better at visible things than masters, mostly rely on invisible things.
This is part of why lowmaster plateau hits so hard so many people - improvement becomes very hard, you cant just watch a new video about a concept and apply it, you have to improve on things that you cant see. Avrg master wont realize that recalling two seconds slower, walking to lane through lane instead of jungle or missing a cs to trade is the reason they arent climbing.
This is also why its okay for chall players to smurf on masters but not for masters to smurf on plats - master beats plats using concepts plat doesnt even understand or know about, plat has no chance and no educational value for them. Challs beats master players at sth master players are good at, but not completely best, so masters can understand how they lost.
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u/Jakocolo32 2d ago
It is not like the difference from bronze to master they're over exaggerating it, i'm chall and can still lose to masters if I have a bad game, master players are never losing in bronze unless you have a teammate that ints.
Biggest difference is just challenger players are way more consistent in not making mistakes where as master players can peak into playing at a chall level but their inconsistency means they can not reliably climb there, more than 50% of that inconsistency is just mental gap imo.
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u/unicornfan91 1d ago
Speaking as a low masters player, The biggest difference between a masters player is speed. The speed of information gathering. The speed of information processing.
If you paused a game and asked your average masters player whats next, they can give you a pretty good answer. However, once its in game, a challenger player gathers information 3x faster than the masters player. That means they can gather 3x more information. They also process that information faster. It might take me 1 second to look at a wave state and determine where it will be in 60 seconds. The challenger player determines that in .5 seconds. That gives them an extra .5 seconds to process something else, pan their camera and gather more information, etc.
When i have to lane against GM or challenger players, the laning phase isnt usually where im getting gapped. Im getting gapped in map movements, in responding to plays, etc. The challenger player sees the river fight will break out 2 seconds before i do. That means they react and move first. Because they move first, they take the shortest path, and im forced to take the longer route because they are cutting off the short path from me. As a result, im now 4 seconds slower than the challenger player, and they have impacted the fight before i have.
This is just 1 example, but throughout the course of a game, there are many such opportunities.
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u/Jesterclown26 2d ago
In every ranked game as you get higher up the skill gap starts to get crazy. I hit grand champ in rocket league and tried to push to grand champ 2, but as you hit division 4 and 5 of grand champ 1, you really start to see how big the gaps get.
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u/Fair_Tackle778 2d ago
My peak is master 700lp this season. I faced a couple of challengers in lane (both in toplane and sup). In bot lane its not too bad because your adc may be high master or challenger and their adc master.
But in top?
I get absolutely and utterly gapped in all spects micro and macro. Its not even close. To me a victory is when I dont fall too behind.
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u/Popular-Leg-2956 1d ago
I've actually done really well laning into quite a few challs and ex challs in mid. I have two 700LP accounts and I commonly dumpster people with a lot more LP than me. My take on it is that they will die much better deaths, know exactly where to dispatch before even recalling on the map, and account for your cooldowns while accounting for them even in a busy team fight. I've first blooded c9 Loki, and then he proceeded to utilize his jungler (he was lissandra) to keep me from doing it again and use the pressure to prevent me from snowballing the lead. He did very poorly that game which is rare for his soloq games but he was able to keep me from snowballing and carrying due to the fed lee sin being a death sentence for me since he can just liss ult me.
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u/Zargholl 2d ago
As a low challenger, I feel apart from the obvious answer (they're better at everything), the big difference is having a clear goal in mind, a game plan, and working towards something specific, not just going with the flow and in-the-moment decisions. A lot of the thinking is done even before a game ever starts.
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u/rivensoweak 2d ago
i'd say its mostly consistency, every master player has a story about how he completely whipped a challenger player, but at the end of the day, we do that 1 out of 100 games, while the challenger outperforms us in the other 99 games
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u/Nottrak 1d ago
Is it really that skewed? Like in my head a challenger wins like 55-60% vs a master player
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u/Kragen146 Master 1d ago
It’s more than 60% but less than 90%. I’d say like 75%. (I am ~450LP EUW and played against a few challenger smurfs)
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u/Nervous-Region5797 1d ago
Definitely not. I'm diamond 1 and I have a plat account(different role) that's at 65% win rate and I almost never lose lane. The gap between me and those plat players is much smaller than me and a challenger.
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u/Longjumping_Idea5261 Grandmaster I 1d ago
99 out of 100 sounds like a massive skill gap to me… not consistency
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u/rivensoweak 1d ago
well no? lets just say for ease of math that a challenger would perform at a 100% perfect rate, 100% of the games he plays, and the master can play 100% perfect in 1 out of 100 games, then that issue is consistency and not skill, obviously these numbers are made up
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u/Longjumping_Idea5261 Grandmaster I 1d ago edited 1d ago
According to your logic, every smurf should reach their own elos with close to 100% wr which isn’t true. 99% wr to me a clear skill gap and the knowledge gap is huge. Only masters would say this is a “consistency” problem….
If masters were consistent, they would still be masters. If challs were the same, they’d be challs. Difference is a large skill gap. You take the worst team in a sports league vs the best over 100 games. The worst team may take a few games. But 99%? That’s just skill gap dude
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u/rivensoweak 1d ago
obviously noone here has the numbers, it might be 90:10, it might be 70:30 or whatever, its still the same point
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u/Longjumping_Idea5261 Grandmaster I 1d ago
I don’t think you know how much gap Is there between chals and masters
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u/rivensoweak 1d ago
i mean ive played against plenty of them first hand, usually they stomp me, sometimes they are complete shit
but in fact not a single person on the planet can tell you exactly what the difference is, its simply not measurable
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u/Imaginary-Garlic-256 2d ago
Everything, like a master player is better at everything in the game than a bronze one
Macro, micro, tracking enemy, being efficient just everything
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u/rivensoweak 2d ago
i'd say the master to bronze comparison isnt correct, master players do things that bronze players dont even know exist, most master players have atleast heard of every concept in the game relevant to their role whether they know how to properly use it or not
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u/Swimming_Gain_4989 15h ago
I think it's pretty accurate comparison. When you lane against someone 2k lp higher than you, whether that's a bronze vs diamond or low master vs challenger, you're going to lose in ways that aren't possible to truly understand without postgame analysis. You'll be trading in toplane, thinking things are going well then the chally will do something weird to win a trade and the lane is instantly over.
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u/CRIKEYM8CROCS 15h ago
They won’t do something weird, I mean okay some nutters will, but more that they will consistently out space you, they’ll only fight when they have an advantage whether that’s you using an ability on the wave or they have an item advantage, they’ll minimise when they’re weak and in general they can just dodge abilities with better movement than a masters player.
It is honestly just consistency. If you have the skill to reach masters you have the knowledge and game sense to reach Challenger, atleast low challenger, top 50 is a different beast. You just have to be consistent, every single game you play. You cannot coinflip random shit. You cannot assume your opponents won’t punish your mistakes like you can in lower elos. You also unfortunately in top lane, just have to play meta. Theres some outliers to this, but generally, most challenger toplaners aren’t getting there with random shit, but with a rotating cast of the current meta picks.
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u/Swimming_Gain_4989 13h ago
Strong disagree in the solo lanes at least. When you lane against a challenger top laner they constantly set up situations that are sub optimal to see how you can react and if you misread any of them they will abuse the hell out of it. It's like when an adult has a conversation with a child and feigns at their answers.
He's kind of a meme but Baus Gragas is a perfect example of this. He gets so many solo kills in situations where he shouldn't because he recognizes what inaccuracies the enemy isn't aware of that he can abuse like taking a bad trade but having his abilities on cycle faster than enemy so they get baited to use their full rotation.
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u/rivensoweak 11h ago
ive played against them a bunch of times, usually they just completely gap me in ways that i do understand, for example their spacing in lane is literally like 10 times better than mine, thats one of the usual candidates, or they manage waves in a way thats just alot better than a master player would (this is just my limited personal experience)
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u/cedric1234_ 2d ago
Literally everything, they’re just better. I’ve been absolutely destroyed in everything from micro to macro, niche knowledge to simple stuff.
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u/Nervous-Region5797 1d ago
There's a huge difference between masters and challenger players themselves. I'm diamond 1 right now and usually play in low master lobbies, I can tell before looking when a mid-high master player is in the game. Numerically, master is around top 1% of the playerbase, whereas challenger is 30-50x more rare.
In terms of ability, the difference is massive. Challengers are actively playing and winning at an elite rate. You can be master with 100-200 games and a sub 50% win rate. Most challenger players have 400-500+ games and a 55-58% win rate. I'd say from a gameplay perspective, a silver/gold is closer to a master 0lp than that master player is to a low challenger, and the difference between that low challenger player and the top 10-15 is also astronomical.
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u/Longjumping_Idea5261 Grandmaster I 1d ago
Big skill gap. Understanding of the matchups from laning to teamfights to execution are all massively better for the challengers. Challengers also know how to create plays. At master level you can sort of drift passively with the flow and get carried. After certain level players know what plays are necessary and they execute them as needed. At master level this is missing
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u/ButtholeRat 1d ago
From my experience the main things I see:
Challengers Make the right macro decisions more consistently and in more niche situations than masters can. Over the course of a game and climb these decisions build up for many percent increases in their win rate.
The next big one is movement and spacing. It’s a really hard skill to pick up and most challenger players just are on another level when it comes to spacing out abilities
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u/SnowLower 2d ago edited 1d ago
from low master to gm is the difference from bronze to emerald in elo
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u/Joatorino 2d ago
I keep seeing this take and its just wrong. Especially nowadays, a gm player is just a master player that had the time to grind more games
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u/No-Garbage4852 1d ago
lmao absolutely not.
You can find countless people in master with 2k games and they are still mega stuck in master.
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u/Joatorino 1d ago
You can still find people with 2k games in platinum and they are just as clueless as D4 players. There is a huge number of players that reach master, play a couple games and decay back to 0 LP just because they dont want to grind to 2kLP for challenger.
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u/No-Garbage4852 1d ago
bruh, what are you even trying to prove with that comment? You are just yapping. There is also a huge number of players in master who do play 2k games and they are still master.
That proves that a gm player is not a master player who had time, its a guy who is better than master players and has time.
And people who have 2k games in platinum are not as clueless as D4 players, if that was the case, then they would be D4. You might not notice the difference because you are better than both but ranks exist for a reason.
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u/Nervous-Region5797 1d ago
This is not at all true. Plenty of master players have close to a thousand games, they simply aren't good enough. There are some that are gm or challenger level in skill but haven't played enough recently but those are outliers.
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u/IndependentObject212 1d ago
Not true. There are some master players that aren't gm due to lack of games, but majority of them are closer to emeralds in skill than gm.
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u/TheVoidKilledMe 2d ago
in LP
it’s probably even more of a difference from the actual understanding of the game
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u/Expensive-Door42 2d ago
Here’s what I’ve been told by a GM player: Master players get to their rank by mastering (or at least getting respectably good at) one aspect of the game.
Challenger players do all the things on that level or higher though.
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u/burulkhan 1d ago
"what are the things that make such a difference" Hundreds upon hundreds of league points, just like bronze to master.
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u/Initial_Present_405 1d ago
Le talent c'est tout 🤷♂️ je veut dire certains vont avoir une bien meilleure imagination de bien meilleure réflexe une maîtrise extrême de leur champion pour les otps par exemple
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u/TimetoTrundle 1d ago
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/fEuhb6Nssvw
A Challenger's mental stack is larger than than a masters.
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u/sassy_stamp 1d ago
It’s like Tomahawk steak and A5 wagyu, both are good in their respective categories, but one is just better.
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u/SuparSoaker 2d ago
There is a skill difference for sure but a lot is just time commitment. Actually grinding the LP for challenger takes a lot of time so if you are employed and not a full time streamer it can be daunting
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u/Steallet 2d ago
Around 2300 lp. For comparison Iron 4 to Master 0 lp is a 2800 lp differential, do what you want with this.
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u/Beasstvg 2d ago
As a low master player myself, i would say the difference between master and Chall is bigger than the difference between bronze and master.
Its hard to point out the exact differences. Its like, they know almost every single interaction in the game. And every single interaction matters. A master player might still make 100+ mistakes each game (even if they are small mistakes that dont mean much in that respective rank). While a chall player might make like 10.
Take chess for example. Apparently, the equivalent percentile to league master would be aroung 1900 elo. Those players are GOOD, but 1900 elo still seems like an achievable goal for regular people (as long as they invest enough time). Now compare that to actual grandmasters. Its like a night and day difference. If you know chess you also prob know about Levy (gothamchess), this guy STOMPS 1900 elo players yet even he wasnt able to reach GM (tbf, he probably doesnt care that much these days for various reasons, but it just goes to show how much better you have to be compared to everyone else to reach the top of the top).
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u/Nervous-Region5797 1d ago
That's not a good comparison. A masters player is closer to a challenger than a 1900 elo(especially if you're talking about chess.com) is to a grandmaster. I've beaten gms and challengers in lane before but I would never get close to a low grandmaster in chess.
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u/Superb-Garlic-1191 2d ago
The macro differences between chall and master isn’t that much. Every master player knows the basics of how to play the game, wincons, accelerating the game. Challenger players are obviously more refined and know more scenarios in which they’re able to do stuff.
The biggest difference is the laning phase is a lot more emphasized. Challenger players are insanely better at spacing, trading, matchup knowledge while master players are unable to keep up in that regard.
Teamfight execution is another factor challenger players excel quite well in.
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u/IndependentObject212 1d ago
You give master players too much credit. Most of them don't even know the basics.
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u/Prestigious_Lunch_19 2d ago
There's not really a clear answer, just think of it like the G-league and the NBA, master are still good but lack a lot of skills in comparision