Coaches Notes 1 - Oct. 2023
I learn a TON while coaching. There is so much undiscovered space in terms of mental, micro, and macro improvement and even MORE undiscovered space in terms of how to improve in and off the rift. Every session is an opportunity for me to refine strategies, get reminded of important details, and more.
In these “Coaches Notes” I’m going to share my weekly or monthly takeaways on the site.
Lane phase is a lot more than just the 1v1
Games are predominately decided in the early game. The first 10-15 minutes generally lock in how impactful you’re going to be relative to the curve. It’s also the part of the game we have most control over. The most intuitive thing in early game is the direct 1v1 with our direct lane opponent, however that is only a piece of lane phase.
I’ve noticed in high elo games, wins and losses are rarely decided from 1 lane getting gapped early. Of course it happens, but they are the minority of games and can typically be chalked up to someone being tilted or mentally out of the game. Typically it requires some more interaction than just a 1v1 to decide a game. So if most laners in high elo will be even or plus or minus a negligible amount after the 1v1 part of lane, what makes the different?
The difference is in all of the externals of early game. Jg tracking. Fighting with the team when the team actually wants to fight. Aligning with teams powerspikes. Aligning with tempo with the proper people. Good early vision that helps progress your specific teams wincons. Good roams. Proper understanding of early objective control relative to both teams.
With high emerald, diamond, and low master players, I noticed this week their 1v1 is sometimes just as good as a GM+ player (or maybe worse by a negligible amount), but their lane phase as a whole is super lacking. I encourage my diamond players to really “zoom out” in their reviews.
You can’t force good plays
Good plays are punishments of mistakes. This inherently means you can’t FORCE a mistake out of somebody. The best we can do is pressure them and be ready.
It can feel like a better player is simply imposing their will on anyone they’d like, but if you go into the review and get into the details, they are capitalizing on opportunities provided for them. The 2 challenges there are 1) being able to pressure the proper things at the proper times and 2) recognizing what a mistake even looks like.
Similar to the last point, I find often in the “middle” elos of gold/platinum/emerald, people try to FORCE their 1v1 or their game idea incredibly hard. The best players are incredibly patient WHILE BEING relentless.
Thinking of jungle camp spawners RELATIVELY rather than OBJECTIVELY
This is a trick for my new jungles or mid laners learning jungle. Knowing that a camp takes 2 minutes and 15 seconds to respawn is fine, but timing that out for all of your camps and the enemy camps feels impossible (unless you play with eight 2.25-minute hourglasses on your desk)
When your opponent shows on the map, you can draw of picture of where they have been and where they are going. If they spend time ganking, clearing vision, or pressuring on the map, you can factor in how late their next rotation of camps is going to be.
For example, if I’m playing a full clear jg like Lillia and I see the enemy full clear jg gank mid after their bot side. I know their top side will spawn 10-30 seconds later than my mirrored camps. That time NEEDS to be used either to pressure on the opposite side, snowball farm, invade, or objective.
