BTS V Master Rank in League of Legends Confirmed on Korean Server

Kim “V” Tae-hyung has reached Master in League of Legends solo queue on the Korean server, the tier that sits directly below Grandmaster and Challenger on Riot Games’ ranked ladder. The BTS vocalist did not announce the milestone outright. It showed up in an Instagram Story, and he has not made his Riot ID public, so the account behind the climb remains unidentified as of 6 August 2026.

The rank puts him inside the top 1.5 per cent of ranked players in a region known for producing much of the game’s professional talent, and it lands nearly three years after he was last publicly logged at Diamond 4.

What Master Rank Means on the Korean Ladder

Master sits beneath Grandmaster and Challenger, the two tiers above it. Clearing Master at 1 LP places a player among roughly 40,000 accounts on the op.gg Korean leaderboard, a group that works out at the top 1.5 per cent of the region’s ranked playerbase.

Korea is also the server credited with nurturing some of the strongest esports players in the world. Because that 1.5 per cent is measured against the Korean pool specifically, the same tier badge counts a player against a far denser field than it would on a smaller ladder.

The one thing the rank cannot be checked against is the ladder itself. Without a public Riot ID, the placement rests entirely on the screenshot.

How the Rank Surfaced in a Grammy Announcement Post

The screenshot was never framed as a gaming update. It appeared in the background of an Instagram Story tied to a Grammy announcement, which is how the r/btsthoughts thread that pushed it into wider circulation labelled it. That thread has drawn 235 upvotes.

Commenters read the pairing as deliberate, treating a rank earned on an open, merit-based ladder as a pointed contrast to the awards conversation, with one poster noting that the game’s abbreviation lands as a joke on its own. A second thread of replies focused on the server, arguing that Korea is the most demanding queue in the game and that the tier reads differently because of it.

V’s Climb From Diamond 4 to Master

The ranked history goes back years. V was at Diamond 4 in October 2023, and by June 2026 had hit Diamond 2 in solo queue, confirmed on a promotion screen showing 44 wins and 28 losses for a 61 per cent win rate across 72 games.

The full run to Master is logged at 184 games, another 112 on top of that June sample. That gap is what separates this from a short hot streak: the 61 per cent win rate covered well under half the games the promotion eventually took.

Those games were played around rehearsals, travel, and the group’s recent Arirang World Tour.

BTS and K-pop’s Long Run With League of Legends

V is not the only member of the group with a League history. Jung Kook has been seen playing on previous livestreams, and the full group filmed a special Run BTS episode in 2020 with T1, the most popular Korean team in the game.

The pattern runs wider across Korean music, where several artists have posted high ranks of their own.

The Gap Between Master and Grandmaster

Grandmaster is the next rung, and it is where the ladder narrows to the top 1,000 accounts in the region. Getting there would take at least 1,300 LP, a steeper jump than any promotion behind it.

Fans are still working through the Korean ladder trying to match an account to the singer. Until a Riot ID surfaces, the leaderboard will not show whether he clears that threshold, leaving the next screenshot as the only public record of it.