Solo Queue Secrets: Three Simple Ways To Quickly Step Up Your Game

There are three things that you should learn to significantly help you step up your game: proper CSing, wave management, and the basics of positioning. In this guide I aim to help you to get a grasp on all three of these.

1. Learning to CS:

CS is the only reliable source of income and fortunately is also the easiest way of earning gold. It’s no secret that practice makes perfect, so I’d recommend that you take some time a couple days a week to just practice CSing in a bot game for 5-10 minutes. You will notice results almost immediately and should be much more confident in your last-hitting abilities.

2. Learn to control the wave:

Something that you can use to step up not only your laning phase but the entire game is creep control. Creep control is broken up into three main ideas, freezing, shoving, and turtling. Freezing is an easy way to deny cs from the enemy laner, or, if they overextend, get a free kill out of them. Freezing is also fairly simple to do; just wait until the last possible moment to last-hit the enemy minions, don’t attack them too early and the wave is bound to be stuck near your tower. I’d recommend trying to do this throughout the laning phase, unless you’re ridiculously ahead of the opponent; in which case you should push your lead by pushing down a tower then group with your team at whatever the most pressing objective is at the time.

Shoving is what you do when you’re ahead or the enemy is located elsewhere on the map. This is achieved by simply slaughtering every enemy minion as quickly as possible. The goal of this is either to attack the enemy tower or stall your lane opponents for long enough to allow you to take another objective with your team or to buy yourself time to back.

The final piece of creep control is called turtling. This is when you don’t kill any minions and allow them to build up and hit your tower. Generally, you only want this when your team is far behind the enemy team and need to stall for late-game power spikes, or if you’re playing Nasus and need some more stacks.

3. Learn the basics of positioning:

Positioning is one of the toughest aspects of the game to learn, and one that is nearly impossible to master. This is why professional players that have consistently good positioning are so highly regarded by their peers and the community, because it requires incredible dedication to the game to reach that level of game knowledge. However, this does not mean that the average player cannot attain a decent understanding of the art of positioning. The first step to getting a good grasp on proper positioning is knowing the basics. Unfortunately, the basics differ depending on your role in the team.

The general idea of positioning as a DPS carry is to put yourself in a place where you can deal the highest DPS to the enemy while minimizing your chance of death. The key portion of this is trying to minimize your chance of death. I find that most players poor positioning comes from them thinking that they need to kill the enemy carries. In reality this usually leads to them ignoring the enemy frontline as well as their own, and resulting in their early deaths.  I think the easiest way to avoid this is just by remembering to be as far away from the closest enemy as possible, meaning that you’re constantly attacking them with maximum range auto attacks or spells. This will help you to deal constant damage without being in the middle of the fight. For reference, you want to be even further away from the Darius in this picture:

As a tank your goal is to keep the enemies from killing your carry, whether that be a Zed or a Jinx. Basically you need to just annoy the enemy by doing whatever you can to hinder them, whether that be CCing them, blocking their spells, or even just attacking them.

Finally, the last role with a significant change in positioning is the assassin. This is by far the most involved role in terms of positioning in team fights. Generally, you want to wait for your team to engage, and then dive the enemy’s biggest carry threat while their team is distracted. However, you also need to be aware of enemy cooldowns like ultimates or cc spells and wait for those to be used before going in. This ensures your safety as well as the death of the enemy carry.

 

Conclusion:

If you use the tips that I have given you in this guide, you should notice immediate improvements in your gameplay, and should notice a steady rise in your winrate over time. By using these tools, you are taking a huge step into getting into the league of your dreams.

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