From a thread about “Low Elo Hell” in League of Legends:
Bad players don’t know they are bad, that’s why they are bad, and they will continue to be bad
thus elo hell is created as an excuse.On the other hand, if you’re a bad player and you know why you’re bad and can determine realistic ways to not do bad, then you’ll get better and stop being bad
Hardcore Casual 
My favorite are the players who can’t accept the whole, some people are good and others are bad concept. You see it a lot in FPSes. Some guy who has been playing for a month sees a hacker every day, whereas someone who has played for 8 years sees 2-3 a month if that. The bad/new player doesn’t realize that there are ways to tell, they just know that the people they can sometimes kill have never had a 10 kill kill streak. Usually you find these players on servers with others around the same skill level, which is why a good player stands out so much and even gets banned for just being better. It is alot like the ol redneck “we don’t take kindly to __________________”.
The fun part about LoL is that you can be good on one champion and very bad on another.
Me? I’m still pretty bad at all of them but I’m trying to get better! :)
Which is totally valid, and is also the reason I did not touch a ranked game during the ‘all free’ weekend. That said, if someone cares at all about their ELO, they won’t play champs they don’t know well, that’s what normal games are for.
I know people might not take kindly to Starcraft 2 around here, but this thread seems related to this discussion:
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=160321
Syn I don’t think that’s the case.
The argument seems to be that low-elo hell exists because other players that disconnect or are of poor skill can torpedo a player’s rise up to their natural skill level. It takes a lot of wins to rise up, which the penalty getting greater each step.
I agree with it. I used to play online chess fairly competitively, and even then once you got to your normal ELO a streak of losses was hard to recover from, and not indicative of skill. It just depended how high up the bracket you played against: its not hard to go sub 1k if you fought against high 1300s, yet demolish any sub1k you’d play at.