Opinion

Are LoL MMR checkers accurate?

SELVA MOONBELL

27 th  January 2025 Edited at: 27th January 2025

HomeBlogAre LoL MMR checkers accurate?

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What is MMR?

In League of Legends, you have a visual rank (the rank featured on your profile) and a secret number called MMR, or Match-Making Rating. MMR is used to decide who to match you against in normal and ARAM games, and dictates how many League Points (LP) you gain or lose in Ranked games. The higher the player's MMR relative to their rank, the more LP earned per win and the less LP lost per loss.
MMR exists as a failsafe against players being in the "wrong" rank compared to their skill level due to luck. It normalizes the rank of players who got to their current rank through lucky winstreaks, or ones that lost their rank through unlucky loss streaks.

For players below Emerald tier, when MMR and rank match, the baseline LP gain and loss is ± 25. For players in Emerald tier and above, the baseline LP gain and loss is up to 5 points fewer than the above, on average.

lp gains in lol

Checking Your MMR

There are programs and websites that advertise being able to tell you your MMR and your "true" rank. However, MMR is a purely internal number. Nobody knows how Riot calculates MMR, and any site claiming to do so is straight up lying.

However, there are ways for you to have a rough estimate of your MMR, and it's how most sites and MMR checkers try and give you a rough number for it—

LP Loss/Gain Ratio

If you gain more LP from winning games than you lose from losing games (let's say, you win 25 LP but lose 15), your MMR is above your real rank. If your LP losses are higher, though, your MMR is lower than your current rank. If they start to become roughly the same, that's when your rank has caught up to your MMR, and you start being consistently queued up against people of your skill level.

Your Teammates and Opponents

Another way to check, is using sites like op.gg and deeplol.gg to check who you're being queued up with.
Up to a point, having lower or higher MMR decides with who you'll be queued up against. The limit is two tiers, with some exceptions, such as Iron IV players only being able to be queued up with other Iron players. This means that, for example, a Silver IV player with very high MMR can be queued up against high Gold players, and even some Platinum players. A player in Silver with low MMR, though, will be more often than not queued up with lower Silver or Bronze players, perhaps even Iron players.
This is because the matchmaking system will try to pair you up with teammates and opponents using your MMR as a "soft cap" of sorts, while your rank as a hard cap.

op gg site

Tier Demotion LP

Another confident way to check how high your MMR is with a low margin of error is tier demotion. Upon demoting from a tier due to too many losses, you will be placed in the highest division of the previous tier.
If your MMR is significantly lower than the tier your were just placed in, your starting LP will be 25. If your MMR is higher than the current tier, however, your starting LP will be 75. If your starting LP is 50, then you are around one tier away from your MMR's ideal rank.

Are MMR Checkers Broken?

This is not to say MMR checkers don't work at all. It was always impossible for them to tell you your MMR exactly, since it's likely a black box algorithm that even Riot developers are not fully confident in how it works.
MMR checkers work by taking a confident guess at your "real" rank, the one your MMR is pulling you towards, by knowing your rank, your recent LP gains and the players you tend to get matched up against.

Other Kinds of MMR

Although you have a ranked MMR, you also have a completely different MMR for Normal and ARAM games. Without LP gains and losses, and playing against a larger pool of opponents, it's harder to get a good read on your MMR. Your MMR in Normal and ARAM games (and partly Co-op vs. AI) will contribute when doing your placements at the start of a new split, deciding what's the minimum and maximum rank you can be placed in.

Fixing Low MMR

There's only two ways to "fix" one's MMR. The first, slower way is to simply play games, reach your ideal rank, then start winning more. This can prove incredibly sluggish, since MMR can change up to 3-5 times slower than your rank. If you improve at a rate faster than your MMR, you'll spend a lot of time ranking up and down, since the game naturally pulls you to the rank it thinks you belong in. Even if you're equally matched in skill, you'll have to maintain an unrealistic 60-75% winrate if you want to stay in a higher rank.
The other way to do it is simply buying a higher rank/MMR account and allowing your MMR to naturally settle to your skill level.
You can check out our fresh MMR accounts here.

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SELVA MOONBELL

Content Writer
Self-professed League historian and lore archivist.
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