Ganking is a fundamental concept in League of Legends. By adding power to a lane or a fight, you can overpower your enemy and secure resources for your team. But what makes a gank successful and how do we do it?

Conditions

Here are a few things to consider before you even try to pull off a roam or a gank.

1. How healthy is my team?

Simple. If you look to gank botlane and your bottom duo is half health and out of mana, there is a very low chance they will be able to help even if your jungle and midlane both show up. Make sure your team is able to follow up if you make your way through, or else it might be better to just farm, pressure, and take objectives elsewhere.

If your team is healthy enough, you can even dive turrets without having to trade kills. Under a turret, the opponent has very little space to escape.

2. Where is the enemy?

This one is a bit more loaded. Not only do you have to consider the positioning of the enemy you are ganking, but also where their jungler/your laner is going to be. This is why a lot of the time you hear the advice "Follow your lane!" If your opponent shows up at a fight and you aren't there, your team is at a numbers disadvantage.

If the enemy is out of position, your success rate in ganking skyrockets. Make sure you won't be running into anyone else and pull the trigger if they move too far up.

3. Vision

Is the river bush at top/bottom warded? Is the midlane raptor camp warded? Am I wasting time by walking down, getting seen, and losing gold/experience?

Of course, there are champions like Hecarim who can just blast past wards or invisible gankers like Evelyn or Shaco. The reason they are so effective is because you can't see them coming. A gank is better if the opponent has no time to react.

Am I Doing This Right?

Now that we know how to pull a gank off, what are we looking to do once we jump in? The key thing that a gank needs to do is put your team ahead of the other in whatever way possible. Here are a few examples.

Summoner Spells

Most of the time, enemy players will choose to burn their summoner spells in order to escape from a gank. If you manage to take an escape spell or two, the gank is successful. It means they have less maneuverability in lane and might fall victim to either your team's laner or another gank.

Summoner spells are on a huge cooldown! At the beginning of the game, without any cooldown items, Flash has a 300 second cooldown (255 seconds if Insight is taken on the mastery tree). Ghost has a 180 second cooldown (153 seconds from Insight). If any other summoner spells are used, it can lead to an easier time for your team and is worth a lot. This leads to:

Pressure

If you've managed to beat the enemy back and have gained both farm and experience, your influence doesn't end there. The enemy will now be more cautious and give your team a big advantage overall. If they disrespect their position, you can always go back and make them pay for it.

Yasuo is being forced off of his own turret here. Twisted Fate ults in for the clean up when Yasuo dashes through the minion wave. A single step forward can get you killed.

Objective Control

If you manage to get a good gank off and the enemy is forced back, whether through pressure or death, you can now take some objectives. The enemy team won't be able to confidently fight you if they have less team members and if you force a lane back, there's no one that can contest you anyways.

Winning the Lane

Some champions that can snowball off of a slight lead can win the lane outright if ganked early. The enemy is already struggling to deal with the matchup and the slight edge you give your teammate will push them over the edge.

Getting the Carry Started

Like the above concept, a gank can set up the long term carries as well. Even if they cannot make use of the gold as early as the above example, they will be quicker to hit their core items and can scale up more quickly, sprinting through power spikes and making it to "carry" status in no time.

Securing an early kill for the bot lane, Blue team is feeding gold into the Jhin who has incredible damage potential late.

The Art of the Gank

The most successful ganks are ones that combine these concepts. Let's look at a few.

Early Game Sweetspot

Many times, you can gank a lane early on and grab some kind of advantage that will snowball the game out of control.

Because many champions begin to pull apart when they get kill potential with their ultimate abilities, a good idea is to gank right before a lane reaches level 6. Both teams will be wrestling over control of the lane and many times, they will be stubborn in staying just to get their ultimate and try to break the stale lane state.

If you can win a gank at this point in the game, you put the enemy behind on their power spike, make them lose a ton of lane pressure, and help your own team reach a state where they can win their lane if they play to their advantages.

Here's an example.

[Source: Heo "PawN" Won-seok in Solo Queue]

Twisted Fate sees an opening in botlane and goes in. He gets Exhausted in the process, but because his team is healthy and ready to fight, they secure the kill anyways.

Ezreal, who needs to scale up with Tear of the Goddess, can now reach that point more quickly without having to worry about Ashe keeping up in gold and getting damage quicker. Botlane now has a CS advantage, a summoner spell advantage, and gets free damage onto the tower as well.

Keep the Pressure! Why You Camp.

When you put immense pressure on a certain lane, it does a few things.

First, they are unable to make proper use of their summoner spells if they lose them every time they come up. If they don't use summoner spells, the enemy laner is probably going to die to repeated ganks.

Second, with the constant threat of being killed, they must either play extremely carefully and lose farm/tower health or willingly take a ton of damage due to positioning.

Or, their third option is to call their jungler over as well, which is worse for them. Their jungler basically will have to stay close by and lose pressure on other lanes/objectives on the off chance that your team jumps in on his laner. Your jungler could be back in base buying items or farming up and their jungler needs to sit with their laner because he has no idea where you are.

Any of these options will lead to an easier time for your team. If the enemy jungler is always gone defending your ganks, the rest of your team can play more aggressive knowing they won't be punished for overextending. If the enemy laner is being put behind constantly, your team's laner will flourish and be able to reach their items and level spikes more quickly.

Here's an example of an unfavorable matchup made much smoother by constant ganking and pressure.

[Source: https://www.twitch.tv/tsm_bjergsen]

Kog'Maw is going midlane against Søren "Bjergsen" Bjerg on Orianna. This is a bad matchup for Kog'Maw, because he needs time and a ton of farm to scale. Kha'Zix decides that it is important for Kog'Maw to scale up and sets up continuous ganks on Bjergsen. Getting ganked early, Bjergsen is unable to take advantage of his level 3 power spike and is forced to retreat. Normally, taking advantage of his favorable matchup, he would be able to push the Kog'Maw out of lane and dominate with an early CS advantage. However, due to this pressure, he is only playing catchup and can no longer rely on his summoner spell mobility. This forces him to be extremely careful.

[Source: https://www.twitch.tv/tsm_bjergsen]

Coming back into lane from getting Blue Buff, Bjergsen is ganked again. He needs to use both his summoner spells once again to get away. Kog'Maw now is able to farm up, just like before. This gank is timed around the Blue Buff timer. Kha'zix knows there is a good chance that the jungler will give Blue over to the midlaner. Knowing where the jungler and midlaner are positioned makes this gank a success. Bjergsen loses minions, experience, precious time on the blue buff, map pressure, and continues to go even with the Kog'Maw even though Orianna has significantly better scaling during the early-mid game.

Because Kog'Maw scales very well into the late game, this is a big win for the opponent team. They have successfully created a situation where their late game carry has gone even in a hard matchup, with the hopes that Kog'Maw will eventually outscale the Orianna.

The Importance of Counterganking

Simply having more champions in a fight will usually net you an overall win during a gank. If you can keep track of where the enemies are on your map or predict that they will go for a fight somewhere, this is a great time to execute a countergank. Because the enemy is expecting the gank to go a certain way, when the rest of your team shows up to help, the enemy will be forced to use whatever they have left or simply die. A well-timed countergank will turn the tables in your favor and waste all the resources the enemy team sacrificed to set up a trap/gank.

This works especially well when timed around objectives. The enemy, already losing a fight with a good chunk of their team, will be too hurt to fight you for any objectives, usually netting you a free dragon, tower, or jungle buffs. This shift in pressure and control will lead you to more successful fights in the future. Here's an example of a good countergank.

[Source: Choi "inSec" In-seok in Solo Queue]

In this gank, Thresh and Varus engage on the Jhin. Little known to them, both Alistar (not actually onscreen) and Evelynn are waiting in the river. If Evelynn had come in to fight, it might have turned out differently. Jhin, expecting team help, uses his Heal to try and bait the enemy team in. If Evelynn and Alistar actually had come in as anticipated, they would have traded one death for two kills. They might have even been able to provide enough disruption to keep Jhin alive. We can see Warwick rush in from the side. Evelynn makes it just out of the bush before spotting Warwick. She actually turns and runs away.

This essentially forces the enemy team to just cut their losses and turn around. If they try to fight this, with Jhin already in a bad position, they might end up losing even more champions and give up either the bottom tower or Dragon. The reason Red Team is even in this position is because they were setting up their own trap. Bot lane is pretty much even before this fight and this might have been the fight to really push one side ahead. This countergank is perfect in that it turns around the entire fight and shows how important it is to keep track of the enemy champion positions.

Conclusion

Ganks are a vital part of League of Legends. They can make or break games and even out the matchups. A highly coordinated team can use strategy and set up traps in order to beat mechanically superior players. This guide has some of the basic ideas and some proof of concepts to help you understand ganking better. I hope this helps you create better situations for your team and can help you climb to higher ranks.

Good Luck!

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