Watching esports is always lauded as a great way to improve individual play, decision making, and analytical skills in your own games. However, it’s far harder to directly apply skills like this – much of broadcast analysis in League centers around macro decision making at the pro level and if you’ve ever played a game of solo queue League below Platinum, it’s not exactly the same level of strategy.

There are still ways to funnel an intensely high level of play into something applicable across elos and champions, and this piece is a guide on how to do exactly that.

Sharpen Your Mechanics

Mechanics feel impossible to improve through viewership – just because you can watch Faker can dodge a skillshot with three frames of warning doesn’t mean you’ll suddenly gain that skill. Instead, honing micro can be avoided entirely through adapting decision making, which can be picked up entirely from watching pro play with the correct intent. League is really a game about making the correct decisions at the right time, with the occasional frame-perfect skill check that can be failed at lower ranks.

In League, the most basic decision required by the game is your movement command – right clicks are easily the most important vector of skill expression in the game. A single change in direction can make the difference between winning and losing a fight, and the beauty is that the barrier of execution is incredibly low (outside of kiting). Once you’ve played the game enough, you subconsciously know your own movement patterns, so if you literally put yourself in the shoes of another player, the differences are instantly noticeable (personally, holding my mouse helps me get a feel for it).

Just by tightening how far forward you walk for a trade, where you choose to recall, or what part of the lane you walk down, you’re applying high-elo execution without much effort. If you can passively absorb the differences between your positioning choices and those made by pro players, you’re going to significantly improve your play, regardless of how marginal the differences are.

Improve Your Creep Score

The laning phase is all about playing around an enemy’s threat – cooldowns, range, and lethal – while stepping up to trade and farm. Farming is easier to copy than trading, because until 8 cs/min there’s a pretty low mechanical requirement, it’s almost all about timing attacks and understanding wave states. Just watching how a player clears a single wave can show a clear distinction between a low elo and high elo player, even if both are able to secure all 6 minions.

Put yourself in the position of one of the players being spectated and focus on which minion you would go for next and how you would secure it, then compare their method and timing to your own. This forces you to make split second analysis about the game and see instant feedback on the holes in your decision making. You’ll notice that high levels of play use abilities to clear very intentionally and sparingly, which is why one of the best ways to master a champion is to farm in the Practice Tool without using any abilities.

A simple example of this is Ahri – who plays lane around catching her opponent with her E (Charm) and executing a burst rotation with her Q (Orb of Deception) and W (Fox Fire). She struggles to reliably land significant damage without the charm CC, so most players know to track her charm timer as a vulnerability. However, if she uses her Q and W to clear the wave she loses the actual threat behind her charm, creating a window as if her charm was on cooldown. Copying as much of the resource efficient farming patterns of high-level players is valuable on several fronts for overall improvement at the game.

Learn Wave Manipulation

So, it follows that using a bunch of abilities on the wave must take wave manipulation into account – crashing a wave or even pushing hard can generate enough safety to where the lack of abilities won’t matter. Wave manipulation is the very core of the laning phase, because every decision is underscored by the current position of the wave, so if you can confirm your own instinct while in game, you could potentially turn the matchup.

It’s not useful to only look backwards on wave manipulation, because there are always multiple correct answers contingent on what the team decides to do. Instead, look to predict what a team is looking to do with their lane priority (or lack of it) around the map – like whether a mid laner is shoving while their jungler recalls, so that the jungler can reset and go straight to an objective. If a side laner starts a freeze a minute before an objective is spawning, it’s likely the team is deciding to not contest it.

You have the opportunity to understand and absorb the correct lattice of decisions by simply watching a pro farm, push, and look for roams. The beauty is, you don’t need mechanical skill or even practice to implement this – once you begin to critically watch for this, it’ll naturally seep into your gameplay.

Teamfight With Intelligence

Obviously, the laning phase tips only apply to the first portion of a match, but there are ways to apply the same fundamentals to the core of the mid and late game. Teamfighting is the most mechanically demanding, coordinated part of the game (remember when Faker’s shockwave found them all?), but just like the laning phase you can complement mechanical improvements with understanding of the fundamentals. A correct decision alone – target selection, positioning, and engage timing – can turn a fight where the enemy doesn’t have the mechanical ability to outdo it.

A teamfight just comes down to “kill the enemy team before they kill yours”, so the complication comes from the fact that everything is modular, meaning that the situation can be infinitely complex, which makes the perfect choice significantly harder to pick out. To that end, the learnings from professional teamfights has to be as far removed from mechanical expression as possible. If you go into your games trying to execute a teamfight as Akali the way Chovy would, it simply won’t pan out positively, unless you’re one of ten players in the world.

Instead of picking a single player and following them through the execution of a play (like you would through laning phase), let a teamfight play out and analyze it backwards, seeing what worked to win the fight or what lost it, and let that knowledge passively accumulate. Usually the casters will draw attention to what blows open the teamfight, and once you know which way the result will go, it’s really easy to retroactively see what happened to create that opening. Did the ADC misposition or did the flank come too early? Or was it something else entirely?

Conclusion

Watching pro League is one of my favorite pastimes, serving as a way to interact with a game I love in a way that isn’t necessarily solo queue. Learning how I could improve just by watching has improved my own game knowledge and gameplay over the last few years, so I hope this guide has been helpful in breaking down how to improve without a grind.