How much does the draft matter?

Champion select changes your chances, but less than most players think. Here is how much, measured, and what it means for how you pick.

How it works

It shifts the odds, it rarely decides them

A draft can leave one team better placed: easier lanes, champions that work together, damage the other team struggles to build against. But most of a game is decided after loading in, by how the ten players play. A good draft is worth a few points of win chance, not a guaranteed win.

Who is playing matters more than what is picked

The same champion is a different pick in the hands of someone with hundreds of games on it and someone playing it for the first time. That is why comfort on a champion often outweighs the pick a tier list says is best.

Small edges add up

A pick that is two points better wins about two more games in every hundred. Nobody can feel that in one game, but over a season of ranked games it is what drafting well is worth.

Measure it, don't guess it

Draft advice is easy to give and hard to check. The numbers below come from millions of ranked games and from a model tested on a patch it never saw, so you can see how big the effect really is.

What our data says

Measured on ranked games and pro matches, read when this page was built. Follow the links for the full tables.

From the ten champions alone, on a patch it never trained on, the model calls the winner of 56.1% of ranked games (2.7M games).
Knowing who is playing as well (their rank, their experience on the champion, their recent games) raises that to 64.3%.
In pro play, the two rosters alone call 67.4% of maps; adding the full draft makes it 67.5% (2,117 maps). Pros mostly draft well, so the draft separates them less.
About four fifths. Across later ranked games, picks the model rated higher won more by roughly 80% of the gap it claimed, so the site shows every cost at that share. Read the study →
How accurate the model is, in full →

Practise it

Play One pick: five boards, one seat each. After every pick you see how far it moved the win chance compared with every option you had.

One pick →