From the outside every coach looks the same. A rank, an hourly price, a profile photo and a paragraph about passion for the game. Nothing on that page tells you whether the hour will change anything.
So people pick on the two things they can actually compare, which are rank and price, and those are close to the two worst predictors available.
Choosing badly costs more than the session fee. You lose the money and the evening, and you usually walk away with a conclusion that is far more expensive: that coaching is a scam, or that it works for other people and not for you.
Almost everyone who says coaching does not work bought exactly one bad hour and stopped there. They were right about that hour. They were wrong to generalise from it, and a twenty minute check beforehand would have saved them the whole experience.
Three checks that actually separate coaches
- Treat rank as a filter, not a qualification. Rank proves someone can play. It says nothing about whether they can watch your game and explain it back to you. Past a certain threshold, and Master is comfortably past it, additional rank stops predicting teaching quality almost entirely.
- Ask what happens before the session and after it. The hour itself is the part everyone advertises and the part that varies least. What separates coaches is whether they did the reading beforehand and whether you leave with anything you can act on.
- Refuse to pay before you have tested them. A trial or intro session is now normal enough that not offering one is information. You are buying a working relationship, and nobody can tell from a profile page whether they will be able to follow how a particular person explains things.
Five questions to ask before you pay
Send these to any coach or platform you are considering. The answers take five minutes to read and they sort the field quickly.
1. “Will you watch my games before we speak?”
You want yes, with a number attached. A coach who reviews one or two of your recent games on their own time arrives with a hypothesis, and the session becomes about testing it.
A coach who opens your match history for the first time while you are both sitting there is billing you for their reading time. That is the single most common way a paid hour turns into forty minutes of general advice.
2. “Who will I get, and do they play my role at my rank?”
A Challenger mid laner is not automatically the right person to explain your support game. Roles diverge enough that the relevant expertise is role expertise, and a coach who last played your bracket four years ago is working from a version of the game that no longer exists at your elo.
If the answer is “any of our coaches” or the assignment is just whoever is free that evening, you are buying availability rather than a match.
3. “What do I have in writing afterwards?”
This is the question that sorts the field fastest, because it is the part nobody advertises and the part that produces the improvement.
You want a short list, and short is the operative word. Two or three things in priority order beats fifteen observations, because deciding what you should ignore is most of the skill. A coach who sends you an essay has moved the hard work back onto you. A coach who sends you nothing has sold you a conversation.
4. “Can I try it before I buy anything?”
Take the trial if there is one, and treat a refusal as an answer. Be equally wary of pressure to buy a block of sessions before you have had a single one. Packages are fine once you know the coach is right for you; as an opening offer they are a way of collecting your money before you can evaluate the product.
5. “What do you not help with?”
The best answer you can get to this question is a real one. Any coach who has done this for a while knows exactly who they cannot help, and saying so costs them a sale.
Vagueness here usually means the seller has never thought about it, or has and would rather you did not. Ours is written down for exactly this reason.
Warning signs worth walking away from
Some of these are common enough to be worth naming plainly.
A guaranteed rank is the big one. Nobody can guarantee an outcome that depends mostly on what you do in the hundred games after the session. A seller promising one is either selling something other than coaching, or has decided honesty costs too much.
Beyond that: no trial and no refund policy, a single coach covering all five roles at all ranks, reviews that all arrived in the same week, and anyone whose pitch is built on their own rank rather than on what they will do with your games. Price alone is not a warning sign in either direction, which is worth saying because the spread runs from about ten dollars to well over a hundred and the expensive end is not reliably better.
“Surely the highest rank is the best coach”
It is the intuition everyone has, and it is not stupid. Rank is real information, it is verifiable, and it is the only number on the page.
Here is why it stops working. The skills diverge. Playing well is largely execution and pattern recognition running fast and mostly unconsciously. Coaching is the opposite: it is the ability to slow that down, notice what you are doing automatically, and put it into words that a stranger two divisions below you can act on. Very strong players are often worse at that, not better, because the knowledge became instinct so long ago they can no longer see it.
The honest version is that rank sets a floor. Below a certain level a coach simply has not seen the patterns that decide your games. Above it, what you are choosing between is teachers, and the way to judge a teacher is to be taught by them once.
From the coach
The question I wish more people asked me before booking is what I would do with their games, because the answer exposes everything. If somebody cannot tell you what they are looking for, they are going to open your replay and react to whatever happens, which is the same thing you already do by yourself. Most of my work is explaining why a decision is correct rather than handing over a rule to memorise, and a player can test whether a coach works that way inside ten minutes. Use the free session for that. You are interviewing us as much as we are looking at your games.
Growth Mindset, Master jungle coach at Level Legendary. See his coach profile.
What to do this week
- Shortlist two, not six. Comparing endlessly is a way of avoiding the decision. Two candidates and one trial each will teach you more than a fortnight of reading profiles.
- Send the five questions as they are written. You are testing how they answer as much as what they answer, and the speed and specificity of a reply is itself a data point.
- Book the trial with a loss in mind. Pick a close game you lost and have it ready. A coach who is good with a messy game you care about is a coach who will be good on a Tuesday.
None of this is specific to us, and the checklist works exactly as well pointed at anyone else. We wrote it down because the questions are the same ones we would want asked, and because a player who books after asking them tends to arrive with a sharper idea of what they want. If you are weighing up League of Legends coaching at all, run the list first. Most of the frustration people have with LoL coaching comes from buying before they knew what they were buying.
Then test somebody with it. A free first session is about fifteen minutes with a Master or Challenger coach who plays your role: they read your recent games and walk one with you, which is long enough to find out whether the way they explain things works for you. No card and no obligation, and if the answer is no you have lost a quarter of an hour and learned what you are looking for.
