Pro Explanations of Solo Queue: What the Best Players Really Think

Ask a professional player what solo queue is and you get a very different answer than you'd expect. We've been collecting those answers since 2012, and the interesting part is how little the complaints have changed.

League of Legends

Pro Explanations of Solo Queue

Updated August 2026

Ever wonder what professional players actually think about solo queue? This page collects them explaining it in their own words. We started it in 2012 and we've kept adding, which turns out to be the most interesting thing about it: the ladder has been rebuilt several times since, and the complaints have barely moved.

They're arranged shortest first. If you know of another one worth adding, drop it in the comments.

Aphromoo on Solo Queue

Aphromoo Explains Solo Queue · 2 minutes 46 seconds

Doublelift on Solo Queue

Doublelift Explains Solo Queue · the solo queue section starts at 14:30, and this embed is set to begin there

TheOddOne on Solo Queue

This video is no longer available. TheOddOne's 49 second explanation was the shortest and bluntest answer on this page for years, and the upload has since been taken down. We've left the entry here rather than quietly deleting it, because a missing video is part of the record too.

Faker on Solo Queue

The most striking modern addition doesn't come from an interview at all. Talking on his own stream in March 2022, after a game he felt was badly matched, Faker said that if he weren't a professional player he doesn't think he'd play solo queue at all, because he found it no fun.

He went further in the same session, comparing the quality of the game he'd just played to a match between two wildly different skill levels, and saying the ladder had stopped being enjoyable. It wasn't a one-off, either: he'd made similar comments a few months earlier about how his region's ladder compared to Europe's.

Worth sitting with for a second. The most decorated player in the game's history, on the strongest ladder in the world, saying the thing every frustrated Gold player says after a bad night. Solo queue frustration is not a low elo problem.

Paraphrased from Faker's Twitch stream, 16 March 2022.

What They All Have in Common

Watch these back to back across a decade and the same three themes come up regardless of who's talking and what year it is.

Solo queue is practice, not competition. Pros consistently describe it as a place to work on mechanics and champion pools rather than something to win. The players treating every game as a test of their worth are, almost without exception, not the professionals.

The teammates are not the problem they feel like. Every one of these explanations lands somewhere near the same point: you get a random team, so does the other side, and the thing you actually control is your own consistency across hundreds of games.

Everyone finds it frustrating. This is the one that should be reassuring. If the best player in the world thinks the ladder is unenjoyable, your tilt after three losses isn't a character flaw, it's the standard experience of the format.

For how the matchmaker actually decides your games, see How Matchmaking Works. For where you really sit on the ladder, we counted it directly from Riot's own data in What Rank Is Actually Good.