Splinterlands recently has made a change to terms of services where accounts that are piloted by scholars have to disclose their scholars. After that Splinterlands also made changes so that you see if you are battling a scholar or a regular player. They also made scholars visible on Leaderboards and that is what I am going to take a look at in this post.
We are about half way through the Splinterlands season and what do we see at the very top of the game? As you can see from the screenshot above there are no non-scholar accounts in the top ten on the Champion leaderboard. And I understand people who have invested the most into Splinterlands assets such as cards want to make sure that they get the best return on their investments so they hire professional players (scholars) to pilot their accounts.
From the screenshot above we can also see that the same scholar Rukawa.Red appears three times in the top ten and CharlesFTW appears twice in the top ten, so these are probably the best Modern League players in Splinterlands.
If we take a look at the next ten players on the Modern Champion leaderboard we see that we have our first two non-professional players in top twenty: CAV0 and Pikylol. We also see J3FF who took fifth place on the leaderboard also appear at number twenty as well and EddieBoy appear on number ten and number twelve. BJYShadow appears at number 14 and number sixteen.
After top twenty we finally start seeing more non-scholar piloted accounts:
Half of the accounts between twentieth place and thirtieth place are piloted by scholars and half are amateur players. That trend of a bit more non-scholar players continues as we go into positions between thirty and forty with sixty percent of accounts still piloted by scholars.
We have exactly the same numbers as we round out the first part of the leaderboard, still only forty percent amateur players. As we enter the second half of the Modern Champion Leaderboard we finally see predominantly amateur players:
These players are rated between 3900 and 4000 ranking and are eighty percent amateur players with only two accounts 
This trend continues for the rest of the Modern Champion Leaderboard. It is interesting to observe that ASDFGHJKIRAAA scholar appears six times on the leaderboard but starting at 33rd position, while the highest ranked scholar Rukawa.Red appears only three times at second, forth and sixth position. CharlesFTW also appears only three times at seventh, eights and twenty fifth positions. Same with J3FF appearing three times at fifth, twentieth and twenty seventh positions. Same applies to PATPSYCHO: 3, 13 and 28th positions.
Based on this analysis the top scholars for Modern Champion Leaderboard are:
Rukawa.Red: 5,600
PATPSYCHO: 5,580
J3FF: 5,480
CharlesFTW: 5,300
With honorable mention of: ASDFGHJKIRAAA who was able to pilot six accounts to the Modern Champion leaderboard achieving the highest rating of 4,360 so far.
Modern Champion Leaderboard is definitely dominated by professional aka scholar players with the best ones mentioned above.
Modern Diamond leaderboard is a completely different picture. While there are scholars here as well for example Elrmapa who is in the first position the majority is clearly amateurs. I would also argue that Elrmapa who appears on the Modern Champion leaderboard is basically going into the Champion Leaderboard and is just passing by in the Diamond on the way to the champion.
As you can see I am at the eleventh position on this Modern Diamond leaderboard and my deck is a fairly weak deck compared to the ones that compete for the top fifty in the Modern Champion Leaderboard. There is a lot of movement in the Modern Diamond leaderboard towards the end of the season so I would expect to finish somewhere in top twenty like I did last season. One of the reasons is that I don't want to compete for the Champion leaderboard. I tried that and I get a lot less glint from the champion leaderboard as I cannot place in the top fifty.
There are only twelve scholars total in the Modern Diamond leaderboard and about half of them is MarkBoye who is placing towards the bottom of the Diamond leaderboard. This compares to the forty eight scholars in the Champion who are mostly towards the top of the leaderboard.
If you want to compete against professional players you should be playing in Champion, but if you want to have more fun experience Diamond Leaderboard is the place to be in Modern.
Though if your deck is very strong it still makes sense to play in Champion as you will get less Glint tokens, but you will get a lot more SPS tokens.
