Why 10 matches decide 2 months
Provisionals are the highest-leverage games you play all season, because they compress a fortnight of grinding into ten placements. Land them well and the algorithm seeds you straight into Gold or Platinum, skipping dozens of low-tier matches that earn almost nothing per game; land them badly and you restart in Bronze with the whole ladder in front of you. The season runs roughly two months, so those ten matches set the floor you spend the next eight weeks building from. That is the real return here — not ten wins, but the tier you don't have to grind back up to. A strong provisional block is the difference between opening the season already inside the range you want and clawing there in week four.