Why 5 matches decide your whole season
Provisionals are the highest-leverage games you play all season, because they compress a fortnight of grinding into just five placements. They aren't played blind, either: the run is seeded from your previous season's final RP — KRAFTON's standing rule, restated in the Update 36.1 notes after Season 36's one-off 1,500 RP reset — and how those five matches go decides where the seed actually lands. Play them well and you open the season tiers above a cold start, skipping dozens of low-tier matches that earn almost nothing per game; play them badly and you start lower than your history deserves. A season normally runs about two months, spanning two major updates, and Season 42 is the stated exception — it runs roughly three, from June 17, 2026 to around early September, while an announced Ranked Revamp is prepared — so those five matches set the floor you spend the entire run building from. That is the real return here — not five wins, but the tier you don't have to grind back up to. A strong placement block is the difference between opening the season already inside the range you want and clawing there in week four.