Never Lucky

This attitude is prevalent amongst the Old Guard type of player.  They feel that fate is victimizing them in some way, and Lady Luck never seems to smile at them.  They always have trolls or AFK on their team, and the enemy team always gets the smurf.

A lot of people recommend watching videos or reading guides in order to get better, but that means that you have to be willing to identify your own areas for improvement.  If a player attributes his ELO primarily to luck, then he's probably already blind to his own mistakes.  For those players who do not play a lot of games, luck is obviously a larger factor, but by the Law of Large Numbers, after a pretty decent number of games, your ELO is pretty representative of your skill level, which is to say that you deserve your rank whatever it may be.

This manifests in games when people call out the enemy laner for being "lucky" when they score first blood on them, or by flaming a fed champion for getting "lucky" or something.  In some cases, they are correct, but in most of those cases, there's usually some underlying factor.  In the case of first blood, they could have been fighting in the enemy creep wave, and minion aggro put a lot of damage on them.  A classic excuse is the fact that they were out of mana.  Whether or not the opponent was capitalizing on this fact may not be clear, but the putting themselves in a dangerous position without mana is their own fault entirely.

I will rarely outright tell people I'm smurfing, since there is no real reason for anybody to know, but if they interrogate me or call me lucky, I will tell them.  Almost always, they won't believe me.  Stats aren't everything, but they are a decent representation of someone's skill and playstyle.  I'll link them my op.gg so they can browse my match history if they want, but almost always, they'll ask how I get lucky every single game.  Those numbers on a Bronze player are highly suspect, but to a stubborn Bronze player, the only reason they die 12 times per game is because they're unlucky.  The only reason I average a KDA of 13.86 is because I'm lucky.  The only difference between us is luck.

Snapshot from op.gg of my recent 20 games on the smurf

When an outplay actually happens, they either won't admit they got outplayed, or won't even be able to recognize the fact that they got outplayed.  Most of the fights are done Runescape-style: two champions standing there auto-attacking each other and casting spells off cooldown until someone dies.  There are no mechanics whatsoever--no jukes, no clever use of bushes, no spell combos.  When someone ends up making a good play, you can expect the defeated player to type "lucky" followed by one or more obscenities in all-chat.