The Dunning-Kruger effect in gaming is the tendency for low-to-mid skill players to dramatically overestimate their own ability while high-skill players tend to underestimate theirs. In competitive games, this manifests as the universal belief that you belong in a higher rank and your teammates are the problem. The psychological mechanism is straightforward: the same skills you lack are the skills required to recognize what you are missing. A Silver player in a competitive game cannot see the mistakes they are making because identifying those mistakes requires the game sense of a much higher rank. This is why external coaching and replay review create such dramatic improvement -- they bypass the self-assessment blind spot.