Yea I used to back when it first came out. I was grandmaster for a brief moment but my MMR dropped and went back to mid-high masters. It felt good to know that I was one of the top several hundred players in north america. There is so much goddamn anxiety and stress involved with that game. Ladder anxiety was very real.
If you play that game a lot, you can multi-task like no other in real life work. It actually transfers over into real life work efficiency like crazy.
The easiest trick to climb the ladder and go up in rank is to drag the game for as long as you can. Chances are your opponent will give up, play poorer and slower than you in the meta. Also, most people try to end the game as fast as they can anyways and by your dragging the game on, that discourages them greatly. Plus when you know what to do in the late game, most people don't since like I said, they just wanna end the game as quickly as possible either with cheese or mid game all in pushes.