Real Advice on “How to Win” Solo Queue Games, Part 1

Note: I realize this guide might be kind of long, but I believe if you really want to get better at League of Legends and are not ranked D1 or better, this guide will benefit you greatly. I also added videos in order to demonstrate some of the concepts I will be discussing in this article/guide!

Are you tired of “pseudoscience” solo queue advice? Honestly I’ve read so many guides claiming they know the answer to climbing solo queue, and end up giving you nonsense advice such as how to manipulate your mood or making sure you have warm hands before you play for better reaction time. Sure these tips might slightly help in a couple of your games, but I’m here to give actual advice on how to climb the solo queue ladder that will benefit you in the majority of your games.

I believe there are three major components of winning a game in league of legends and actually becoming a better player. These three components are learning not to throw, becoming a “solid player”, and learning how to cheese your opponents. Each of these sections contains quite a large sum of information, so I will be splitting up all the information into three different articles. For this article, I would like to start with in my opinion the most interesting, “How to Cheese”.

So what do I mean by “cheesing”? Cheesing is when you do something considered relatively low risk in hopes of achieving something that is relatively high reward. There are endless ways to do this in a game, and by mastering some ways to cheese your opponents, you can easily gain the advantage in many solo queue games. Some examples of cheesing your opponent include getting a “cheap” kill on a lane opponent, doing a strategic invasion of the enemy jungle, baiting an objective, and fighting when your character reaches a “power spike”. To illustrate what I mean I’ll be sharing common ways I cheese my opponents in ranked games below. Keep in mind, there are many other ways to cheese your opponents in your matches, and it is up to you to discover how to implement cheesing into your playstyle and games. I hope the below examples help you realize how strong cheesing your opponents can be.

 

The Blue Side Late Invade

The blue side late invade is something that was introduced to me by a good friend Brian “Ugu” Kim, a season three challenger 5’s player. It is by far one of the strongest ways to cheese the enemy team and I do it almost every single game in solo queue.

Here is how you do the invade. The whole invasion revolves around your bot, mid, and jungler grouping in the bottom river brush, waiting until 1:53 to invade the enemy team’s jungle. Ideally you want to pick a support with a strong CC (Crowd Control/Status effects) level one, such as Morgana, Blitzcrank, Thresh, and maybe even Annie. It is recommended that your mid laner also has a source of hard CC that you can chain with your CC, but it isn’t necessary. As soon as the game timer reaches 1:53, you let your support lead the team to their blue buff, where the jungler, adc, and support should be and the buff has just spawned. Let your support hit their CC skill, and burst down whoever it hits. After this the jungler and team should rotate and take control of the buff. If the enemy jungler is still alive, attempt to zone him from the buff to prevent his smite or make it extremely risky for him to attempt to smite it. Ideally your jungler successfully smites the buff, and if your team gets first blood the jungler will be level two without killing the smaller minions. Your team can then go play the game as you would normally, except with the huge advantage you gained with the invasion. Here is a video to demonstrate how to do the late invade!

So these two clip show you basically how to do the late invade. Look how we enter the brush, we enter it from bottom lane to prevent anyone coming down from seeing us enter the brush. In both clips we get kills and blow a lot of summoner spells on the enemy team. Unfortunately we didn’t get the buff in either clip. In the Nocturne clip, the Nocturne should have just went for the buff steal as he didn’t aid much in the kill, and in the Lee sin clip he barely misses the smite. Regardless our team gains a massive advantage bottom lane in both clips, as we kill the enemy ADC’s each time and blow all their summoners. This results in our bottom lane destroying the enemy bottom lane both games due to the massive advantage we received from our summoner spells, extra experience, and extra gold.

You might be wondering what makes the invade so strong, and I’ll tell you why. Let’s start with the risk aspect. The risk aspect is considerably low because not many players know how to correctly react to the late invade (I will explain how to react to the invade later). When the invade doesn’t work, it’s usually because your invade gets spotted because you didn’t leave the spawn early enough. In this case all you need to do is just play the game regularly and leash for your jungler at red. Another risk is losing the “mini-teamfight” at blue buff, which shouldn’t happen because you should have four people invading (your mid, jungler, adc, and support), fighting three people doing their buff (their jungler, adc, and support). By far the biggest risk of doing the late invade is your mid laner potentially falling behind. This is because most mid laners like to shove early on, and if the enemy laner does not try to help their team when they are invaded, your mid laner will most likely fall behind in exp and gold. However, there is so much to gain out of doing the late invade, so let’s take a look at why it has so much potential benefits.

Here is a list of the potential benefits you get from doing the invasion, sorted by likeliness, keep in mind you can get all these benefits in one invade.

-Extremely Likely: You burn enemy flash, enemy bot has weakened lane because of invasion damage.
-Very Likely: You get a kill and first blood; you burn multiple flashes; your team has slight experience advantage from first blood kill; whoever you kill is extremely behind in either jungle clear, or is dead or forced to recall and start their lane at a massive gold and experience disadvantage.
-Semi-Likely: You get the enemy buff (also denying their jungler blue buff and exp).
-Unlikely: You get a double or triple kill.

The pro and cons of patch 4.8 and the current meta in relation to the late invade:

During patch 4.6 I believe the invade was a little easier to do because trinkets didn't work until around 1:50, so there were very few early wards placed if at all. That being said, not many supports ward early, and if they do ward early and you have your whole team grouped you might be able to get a first blood kill while they are warding. The currently meta brings some advantages to the invade though, as no jungler will be on purple side and start red buff, so the invade is almost guaranteed to have opponents to kill. Also most mid laners in the current meta do not leash very often, and if they do it’s over the wall. This again guarantees the fight will be a 3 vs 4, in your team’s favor. Lastly, Riot increased the gold reward for first blood so you get a lot more gold than in previous patches, only adding to the reward aspect of the late invade.

How to prevent the late invade and how to properly react to it:

In the rare instance you do get late invaded, follow these steps. The first thing to do is not panic, just stay calm and try to ward the blue buff and get to a “safe area” or out of vision, attempt to save flash until you absolutely need to burn it. Your jungler should attempt to smite the blue buff over the wall and then back off, and cut his losses (the slower jungle clear) Let your mid laner know that he needs to push his lane and push it fast. He needs to do this to deny the enemy mid laner cs and experience, as he’ll arrive to lane late without any experience if they don’t get a kill. This lets your mid laner reach level two first, which will give him a huge advantage as explained below.

To prevent the late invade all together, it’s as simple as just using your trinket ward to ward the river brush over your wall. It’s surprising how often teams don’t do this, and as a result the late invade is usually successful. Unless you are playing aggressively or invading, you should not be using your trinket to ward their tri-brush.

 

The Level Two Cheese

This cheese comes from the “power spike” many champions receive at level two, as many champions receive a huge amount of kill pressure if they get level two before their lane opponent. Again, I’ll explain how to pull off this “cheese”, list the risks, list the benefits, and how to prevent yourself from getting cheesed like this.

This strategy relies heavily on reaching level two first due to the access to an extra ability, as well as the health and stats received by leveling up. To rush level two, you want to push the lane at a moderate rate. To do this, you should be auto attacking the minions often enough to get them to die early on, but not too often as the wave will just push to the opponent's tower and you’ll lose kill pressure. Once you get level two, you can either attempt to kill your opponent or simply zone them from the wave, denying them experience and gold. For reference, solo lanes will hit level two after the first minion wave plus one melee minion while duo lanes will hit level two after the first wave and three melee minions. Keep an eye out on how close your lane opponent is to level two to make sure they don’t reach level two before you! Here’s a video showing how to hit level two first, as well as the power spike in damage that comes with level two!

There are very few risks of rushing level two, the only real risk I can think of is drawing the jungler’s attention to your lane because you get in a lot of early damage and may be pushed up in your lane. However, you should be able to use a trinket in your lane around 3:10ish, which is around the time when junglers are done with their buff clear and are looking for ganks. However just because there few risks involved in rushing level two, it doesn’t mean you should do it in every matchup. For example, some champions have superior wave clear, harass, and level two kits than others. To highlight what I mean, let’s set up the lane of Darius vs Irelia. Darius beats Irelia in level one trades, can harass her with Q level one, pushes the wave faster to hit level two first, and has a stronger level two than Irelia. Recognizing this, the Irelia player should accept that Darius will hit level two first. Irelia should play safely, staying back and sacrificing some cs until she thinks she would be able to at least evenly trade with Darius.

I think the benefits are pretty obvious. If you take the enemy by surprise, meaning the enemy doesn’t have the knowledge of when champions hit level two and gets too close to you just as you level, you should be able to kill them or get off massive amounts of damage. In both these scenarios you gain a huge lane advantage and should be able to have a much easier time laning. If you don’t take the enemy by surprise, you gain less of an advantage, but an advantage nonetheless. You are able to zone the enemy, preventing them from getting experience and last hits, and sometimes the enemy may be greedy and try to get a last hit in which you are able to punish them and kill them or again deal out massive damage.

As explained by the “Darius vs Irelia” scenario, the easiest way to prevent yourself from being cheesed at level two is to know when you should play safer than your opponent. This knowledge comes from making mistakes, playing various champions, and overall just learning the game. Another way to prevent yourself from being killed by an opponent rushing level two is to see how many minions away he is from hitting level two. Again, a solo laner needs a wave plus a melee minion and a duo lane needs a wave and three melee minions. An even easier way to avoid getting killed is when your opponent is about the kill a minion and is positioning himself to get extremely close to you. If your opponent is closer than he safely should be, he probably has a reason. When it comes to bottom lane, remember to auto attack the minions and not simply last hit them. Aggressive play wins bottom lane, make sure you can hit level two around the same time as your opponent. If you can’t or are simply getting out pushed, just play safelty.

 

The Objective Bait

One of the most common ways teams attempt to cheese their opponents is by baiting an objective, usually dragon or Baron. This strategy can work if you’re either ahead or behind, and if you're ahead it can force the teamfight your team needs to ace the team and secure the win. If your team is behind, it can give you the edge in the teamfight if your team is able to quickly pick off an opponent and may just put you back in the game. Baiting objectives is something your team can do almost every game, as long as you are able to set up wards and deny the enemy vision it's almost guaranteed to be a successful play. This strategy is so effective that it is commonly used in LCS and other pro matches. So here’s how we objective bait.

Again the objective bait focuses on denying the enemy vision of the objective, while securing your team’s vision around it. Although you can bait almost any objective on the map, I’ll be talking about how to baron bait. To secure vision around baron, you need two pink wards, and one sweeping trinket. What brushes to stack in and what trinket depends on what side of the map your team is on.

Blue side:

When baiting Baron on the Blue side of the map, you want to make sure you have Baron and the river brush pink warded to guarantee they don't have vision of Baron. You then want to stack up in the banana brush, trinketing it to make sure there are no wards there. The reason you stack up at this location is because if they come from the left to ward over the wall you can kill them and if they come from the right from wraiths, you can also kill them. If you believe the enemy is stacking up in banana brush, I would ward over the red buff wall.

Purple side:

When baiting Baron on the purple side, again you want to have Baron and the river brush pink warded. I also recommend warding the locations shown below so you know which way the enemy is coming. Now you should stack up in the brush where the characters are above and sweep it with the red trinket. If the enemy comes from right in front of you initiate with the element of suprise. If the enemy comes from the blue buff path, simply rotate, hugging the wall to prevent them from seeing your team. This should allow you to get the jump on the enemy team, which will hopefully result in an ace.

Another vital part of baiting Baron is knowing when to actually bait it. I find the best time to bait baron is when someone shows bottom and the enemy team is not in position to easily contest baron. Make sure to clear all the wards quickly while sweeping the wards in the brush that you are stacking. When the enemy team or some of the enemy team comes to contest Baron, use their lack of vision to quickly pick off easy targets and force the teamfight, in which you will most likely win.

So let’s take a look at the risks of doing a bait. The biggest risk comes from a the possibility of not clearing all the wards and the enemy knows where your whole team is. If the enemy team has vision of you and hard engages, your team will be at a major disadvantage. Make sure you clear all of the wards around Baron to prevent this from happening. Another slight risk is that your team essentially just wastes time and the enemy groups in order to push towers. In this case you can either just do baron if the enemy team is all the way bottom, or you can rotate to engage or stop their push. Now let’s look at the potential rewards.

The first obvious benefit of doing objective bait is that your team has the advantage in the teamfight, “hit first and hit hard”. Winning this teamfight brings many rewards, the most basic coming from the extra income gained from killing your opponents. Often times the Baron bait can result in a pick or two that can also allow your team to group up and push mid lane or other objectives fairly easily. In the case that your team actually aces the enemy team, it allows for even easier pushes, or you can do baron uncontested for the massive gold and power spike. Late game, getting an ace may even just mean you win the game, so you can potentially win the game off this one strategy.

To prevent your team from getting cheesed from this bait, you want to make sure that you are extremely careful when attempting to contest an objective that you don’t have vision of. Here is a clip from the Curse vs CLG game last Sunday, showing exactly what I mean. CLG realizes that there was a possibility that Curse may have been attempting to sneak a Baron in, but Doublelift realized that it was most likely a bait. As a result, we can see the ward go down and the instant E away to prevent himself from getting caught.

Action starts at 40:55

Learn to recognize these types of dangerous situations and learn how to react to them properly. In the case that your whole team is in position to counter the objective, make sure your tanks/hard initiatiors stand at the front, protecting your carries from getting picked off. Make sure to look at their team too, if they have an Orianna, do not stay all bunched up. Likewise, if the enemy team has a Lux, do not stand in a straight line.

Conclusion

I really hope you enjoyed reading the first section of my guide, learning the importance of cheesing and some easy ways you can cheese people in your games. By setting up plays that allow you to cheese your opponent, you will be able to gain the advantage in a significant amount of solo queue games, especially at lower elos.

Again keep in mind that there are many ways to cheese your opponents and it is up to you to recognize situations that can give you a major reward from little risk. If you have some ways you commonly cheese your opponents, let me know in the comments below or send me a message, I’d love to hear them.

I'll be writing the other two sections on how to win solo queue games shortly!