Sup y'all, Konduit here. Today we're going over a complex League of Legends topic (but an extremely valuable one), so strap in. Shotcalling and the evaluation of your own (or other's) shotcalling are difficult endeavors to master: it's a skillset that needs to be developed over a great deal of time playing and watching the game. I am still working myself on developing this skill...but what I'm going to show you today are a couple concepts and theories at a general, surface level that will help you start thinking critically about your own play calls and those you see on tournament streams.

The grand takeaway from this article is to not be entrenched in results-oriented thinking. Let's say you make the call to start a teamfight and move forward to proactively initiate. The teamfight goes sour, and your team ends up losing the fight and subsequently baron. Was the play call to force a teamfight a bad one?

Not necessarily. Just because the teamfight was lost doesn't mean your decision to fight was incorrect! There are two factors that influence the direction and result of any play call - Risk Analysis and Execution. Before we go any further, I'd like to thank Marshall Sutcliffe and Brian Wong, who first introduced me to the concept of results-oriented thinking on their Magic: the Gathering podcast, Limited Resources. Here's the link to the specific podcast that inspired this post (the main show topic starts around 21 minutes). I'd also like to give a shoutout to Moomoo, during discussions with whom many ideas in this article came to me.

Let's start with a card game analogy. I've been playing card games for years, and I've realized that many principles from those games carry over to League (the reverse is also true, by the way). If you've played MtG or Hearthstone, you know that they're games of probabilities, of maximing your odds to succeed given that there's hidden information in the game (feel free to skip this paragraph if you're unfamiliar). In Blizzard's online card game Hearthstone, if your opponent just used Flamestrike (the card's image is to the right, courtesy of Blizzard Entertainment) to clear your board, the correct play is very often to redeploy threats and go wide, as it's unlikely they'll have second Flamestrike (let's assume the card Blizzard/other board clear effects don't exist in this example). But lo and behold, they have another Flamestrike and use it wipe your board again! Never lucky! Now, was it wrong to play multiple minions to the board in that situation? In most cases, not at all. The probability of your opponent having or drawing into a second board clear after the first was unlikely, and playing around that possibility would be too conservative.

As we move back to League, the above analogy teaches us an important concept: just because the result of a decision was negative, we shouldn't discount the decision as incorrect on its face. Funnily enough, the reverse is also true; the result can be positive but the decision may be incorrect! However, in MtG or Hearthstone, you make decisions accounting for hidden information; in League, there's no hidden information right? Well, that's true and false. Certainly, you can evaluate the status and power level of all the champions in the game (item purchases, levels, etc. are not hidden), so you can effectively gauge how strong your team is relative to the opponents'. But there are some hidden factors that can have an impact on your decision-making: fog of war (where the other team is located at any given time) and, most importantly, execution.

Execution is perhaps the most complex, dynamic, interesting, and fun aspect of League of Legends to analyze. Execution is the "hidden" factor, the exciting component that makes every game different - even when the exact same 10 champions are being played! The match isn't decided based on the champion draft phase - one team composition may be "better on paper", but execution has a much greater influence on the end result. Nor is it decided simply by the decision to engage in a 'favorable' teamfight, as any number of micro execution details can sway the course of the engagement. And that's what makes League of Legends so exciting - the game is rarely won or lost based on champ select, your actions and performance in-game are the largest contribution towards the final outcome.

The quintessential example of this is something many of you can relate to: back in season 2/season 3, I used to run into all-AD (physical damage) team compositions frequently in ranked. My team and I would joke "Heh, this is easy, just build armor and win the game boys." But oftentimes I found myself losing to these full-AD comps, even though on paper our team composition was not only more well-balanced but scaled better. Looking back, it's all too obvious that though my team was favored going into the match, the deciding factor was player skill and execution!

Let's return to our teamfight shotcall example and modify it a bit. Analyzing the current game state, you judge that your team is ahead and favored in a potential teamfight - probably around 60-40 to win. This may seem odd to you at first (considering teamfights in probabilities) but thinking in this way can help you in your shotcalling endeavors. Where does this probability come from, and why is there a probability in the first place? After all, if your team is ahead, you should win the teamfight, right?

The wrinkle, again, is in execution. You don't know whether you're going to get the ideal initiation, whether you're going to hit all your skillshots, position correctly, avoid their ultimates, etc...there's so many things that can happen in a given teamfight that it's never REALLY certain what the outcome is from the outset. A team can be highly favored to win an engagement of course, and in these cases execution becomes less and less of a concern (your advantage can be so great that your burden of execution is extremely low), but there will be many situations in which the assessment is not so clear. This process of analyzing each team's current strengths, weaknesses, potential lines of play, engagement patterns, etc. is what I call Risk Analysis.

In order to play your cards right, you've got to analyze risk and gauge your burden of execution for each situation.

Risk Analysis and execution are deeply interconnected, as the latter is an integral component of the former. Every decision you make in the game involves risk analysis, either consciously or unconsciously. Becoming faster and more accurate in your risk analysis and game state evaluation is the steady progression every player takes, especially for those who aspire to be dedicated shotcallers. But these principles are more than applicable to everyone - in a 1v1 toplane, the same process takes place: "Can I hard commit and force an all-in? What needs to go right in this fight in order for me to win? Which skillshots do I need to dodge, and which of my abilities do I need to hit? Assuming average execution on my part, I'm probably 70-30, still favored to win this. Executed optimally, this fight is guaranteed." For more information on individual-level risk analysis, the burden of execution, and champion dynamics, check out this article here.

Again, simply because the result of a decision was undesirable does not make the decision incorrect. It certainly could have been incorrect, but the result in and of itself does not make it so. (Vice-versa, a decision may have been incorrect to make, but you achieved a positive result: you just got away with it without being punished!). You have to go a step deeper than simply a results-oriented analysis: execution could have been the most relevant factor in things not going as you hoped. It's easy to say after a botched Baron call, "Man, we shouldn't have done that, it was a bad call." But your critical level-up as a player comes when you ask yourself, "What could we have done differently in that Baron situation such that we would've come out ahead?" Start analyzing your execution, your coordination peeling off of Baron and turn on the enemy team, what skillshots you could've hit, what adjustments you could've made to your positioning. Changing any one - or all of these variables - could very well have influenced the end result and made it a positive one. Alternatively, you could've taken a completely different approach and avoided the Baron fight entirely - that too may have been a valid line of play.

So, let's go back to analyzing the initial decision again - execution is only one piece of the puzzle, risk analysis as a whole encompasses it. What is the burden of execution your team carries in order to succeed in the baron play? Is it reasonably possible to take a teamfight when your team gets low from battling baron? The fundamental two questions that need to be asked when considering any play call are: 1. What are the odds that this play is successful? and 2. Is this risk worth the reward?

The answers to both of these questions are highly situational and can be difficult to determine. Different people may give you different responses to the same question! These issues can be fairly subjective, and there can and often will be multiple lines of play and several reasonable arguments for each side. But, decisiveness and confidence in the face of this ambiguity is one of the factors that distinguishes great shotcallers.

It's important to recognize, however, that a great deal of negative results are in fact due to poor decisions. Execution is important, but being in the wrong place at the wrong time, initiating when you're not sure where the rest of the enemy team is, etc. are decisions that are reasonably unlikely to result in a favorable outcome and should be avoided. If your burden of execution is so high that you need to completely outplay the opponent (or they need to miss all of their skillshots), you probably want to avoid that fight, bide your time, and engage when you're on a more equal footing. This is a central component of the "risk vs. reward" question.

But how do you determine whether a negative outcome was due to poor execution or taking too risky of an approach in the first place? As Marshall and Brian discuss in their podcast, this is something that comes with experience and going through (or observing) the same situation multiple times, as well as taking the time to "logic" it out. As your League knowledge and general game sense grow, you'll be able to get a feel for whether a line of play is a safe and reliable one. If you're ever in doubt, ask a more experienced friend or a close peer; in my experience, having these sorts of discussions with friends was one of the big contributors in improving my macro game sense. After thinking about the decision and evaluating your odds of success (being careful to avoid hindsight bias), if you determine that making that choice was correct, then you've identified that it was your execution of the play that needs to be changed. Break down the micro, replay the execution in your head, and visualize how the engagement should have gone - you'll be better equipped to execute correctly next time.

The risk vs. reward consideration isn't as black-and-white as it seems, I will mention. In the end, you have to play to win - this means taking the line of play that will give you the best chance of winning the game - not not losing the game (for more discussion on this topic, check this out). This means that sometimes you have to go for that 10-90 baron steal, because if the other team gets baron they'll just storm your nexus. Sometimes you SHOULD go for a risky 1v1 in the enemy jungle, not knowing where all of the other team is - fighting fair 5v5 teamfights against the enemy's wombo combo team comp looks even more risky. Again, make calls that give your team the best shot of winning the game (without shouldering an unreasonable amount of risk). When in doubt, take the decision that best aligns with this directive! There will be time to analyze the results later, but in the moment you have to move forward.

There's a great deal more to the topics we covered today; we've only just scratched the surface of evaluating play calls, but hopefully the discussion's been helpful. Don't evaluate your play calls simply based on the result - analyze the execution of each call and, with time, you'll get better and better at determining and evaluating where improvement is needed (whether it be in decision-making or execution).

That's all for today, I hope you enjoyed the article. If you'd like to discuss anything League, have comments/feedback on this article, or just want to say hi, feel free to tweet me @k0nduit and I'll get back to you.

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