How Many Hours Does It Take to Go Pro in League of Legends?

Ask ten people how much practice it takes to go pro in League of Legends and you'll get ten different numbers, most of them somewhere between "a lot" and "everything." That's not really an answer, but it's honest, because nobody in the dossier of interviews and guides floating around actually agrees on a fixed figure. What exists instead is a pile of estimates from different eras, different teams, and different levels of the game, all pointing in roughly the same direction without ever converging on a single number.

The same tension shows up outside League too. Glance at valorant team rankings and you'll notice teams built on structured scrim blocks outlast squads that grinded solo queue alone and hoped it translated. League's version of that argument has specific numbers attached to it, which is part of why the question feels answerable when it isn't quite.

The Big Numbers People Throw Around

Esports.net's guide cites an interview in which Bjergsen said top NA LCS players put in at least ten hours a day, sometimes more depending on how far someone wants to push it. The same guide claims most professional LCS players train between eight and ten hours daily, and that someone chasing the very top of the ladder might invest twelve to fourteen hours. According to that page, the time isn't just queueing up games solo: it's scrims, analyst-led review sessions where the team picks apart what went wrong, and solo queue on top of all of it to keep mechanics sharp. That's the framing most casual searches land on, and it's not wrong exactly, but it's also years old and describes a specific era of LCS structure rather than a universal law.

Other guides land in similar territory without adding much precision. WeCoach describes rigorous schedules "often 8+ hours daily, including scrims and VOD review." Propel RC puts the range at six to twelve hours daily, six or seven days a week, with a separate line suggesting eight to twelve is more typical. Gfuel says much the same: eight to twelve hours daily, with two to four years of muscle memory building before someone is competitive at all. Intel's account, drawn from interviews with two pro players, splits things into six to eight hours of structured team practice plus "several more hours" of self-directed grinding on top. None of these numbers contradict each other loudly, but stack them side by side and the range runs from six hours to fourteen, which isn't a range so much as a shrug.

What the Team Liquid Story Actually Showed

Business Insider's 2015 reporting on Team Liquid is more specific, and also older than most of the guides citing similar figures. Team Liquid players practiced together for eight hours a day, scrimmaging against other pro and Challenger teams, with a stated minimum of fifty hours a week and "most play the game far more." The same piece describes players sleeping only four hours a night while putting in that same twelve-to-fourteen-hour stretch, which reads less like a sustainable baseline and more like a warning about what the job can demand at its worst. That's the tension buried in a lot of these numbers: the heaviest range shows up both as an aspirational target and as a symptom of burnout, depending on who's describing it and when.

Why Bjergsen's Own Account Complicates the Simple Version

Bjergsen himself, in a 2016 interview with ESPN, pushed back on the idea that raw hours separate pros from everyone else. He said every team scrims roughly six to nine hours, five or six days a week, and that the real gap between top teams and the middle of the pack is what happens outside those scrim blocks: conversations, theorycrafting, tape review, deciding whether to schedule more scrims at all. It's optimization, not volume, doing the heavy lifting in his telling.

His own history doesn't fully back away from extreme hours, though. A 2022 piece on his comeback describes him grinding fifteen-hour days, racking up over four hundred games in a matter of weeks, specifically to test whether he could still handle that kind of workload. That's a self-imposed stress test, not a stated requirement for anyone hoping to go pro.

Khan, describing SKT's routine to Inven Global back in 2019, painted a schedule that shifts with the season: scrims from early afternoon into the evening, with solo queue squeezed in around it, sometimes less available once the season is underway. And Doinb's account of FPX's 2019 Worlds prep, reported by Dot Esports, described 14.5-hour days split between six hours of scrims and blocks of solo queue running past midnight, on only five and a half hours of sleep. That's tournament bootcamp behavior, not an entry requirement.

What the Numbers Add Up To

ExpertBeacon estimates League of Legends specifically takes somewhere around three thousand to five thousand hours to reach a professional level, though its own math elsewhere suggests hitting ten thousand hours at three hours a day would take over nine years, numbers that don't quite reconcile with each other. Gfuel's two to four years of skill building before joining a competitive team is the closest thing to a timeline in any of this, and even that comes with the caveat that it varies by dedication.

None of this adds up to a clean formula, which is probably the honest takeaway. An mmr checker can tell you where your rank sits, but it doesn't map onto scrim hours, analyst reviews, or the specific grind Khan or Doinb described. The hours quoted across these sources range from six to fifteen a day depending on who's talking and what point in their career they're describing, and treating any single figure as a fixed target matters less than asking whether the time you've wasted on LoL was spent on the right things in the first place.