Gaining the advantage in League of Legends is one thing but keeping up with the lead can be quite the struggle. There a few different ways you can maintain your lead, and it usually varies throughout the game.

Different Kinds of Leads

What counts as "being ahead" in your lane can be as little as a CS difference to as big as a 3+ kill lead. Depending on what lane you are in and what sort of obstacles you are against, gaining the advantage relies on multiple factors. It is important to identify what kind of a lead you have, since this will change the steps you need to take to ensure you keep it up. For example, if your lead is mainly minion kills and turret plates, you are constantly pushing against your enemy laner and forcing them away from the lane minions. You will need to keep steady vision in the jungle and river around you to watch for any enemy teammates who may come and assist their ally in bringing you down.

It is beneficial to keep your lane enemy pushed in and low on farm, but it can easily be turned around if their jungler or mid laner comes and kills you. With you waiting to respawn, they could have pushed against your turret and caught up to your lead or secured an objective to push towards victory. Either way, you will not be able to maintain your lead if you are intercepted by the enemy team, so always be sure to keep your vision up through Control Wards and regular Wards.

Besides out-farming your enemy laner and tearing down their turret, your lead in lane can easily be your kills and/or assists. No matter what lane you are in, one of your main goals is to defeat your enemy laner so they have to return to base or respawn. Keeping them out of the picture can help you and your team win uneven fights for objectives, which will ultimately lead to winning the game. It is important to always assess the situation and how exactly you can come out on top; what abilities of theirs are on cooldown, is another enemy nearby, and what kind of items have they built against you are all crucial questions to ask yourself before engaging. If you can identify a weak link in the team or a specific player, you can use this to your advantage when facing them in a fight. Keeping your lead is best done by optimizing on your enemy's weaknesses and disadvantages, so it is important to always be gathering information to use against them.

Choosing Your Battles

Whether you are ahead or behind, it is important to carefully decide what moves to make and what fights to partake in. If you are ahead but the enemy was able to shut down your carry before an objective, it will not be a good idea to take on an uneven fight if the rest of your team is not very fed. Alternatively, if you were able to catch an enemy off guard and defeat them before an objective, you can utilize this opportunity to fight an uneven fight with the odds in your favor. It is important to take fights that are even five versus five, or that are uneven, like a five versus three with your team having more members. Fighting with less teammates than your enemy can easily lead to a quick win for them, which can then lead to you losing your advantage.

Again, it is key to always assess the situation before engaging on it; be sure to take vision, ability cool downs, and item builds all into account before deciding to move against the enemy team or secure an objective. If you are unsure about a situation, do not go into it alone, and be sure to stay with your team and communicate what steps need to be taken next.

Identifying Your Win Condition

Knowing what plays to make based off of what scenarios you are presented with is an important skill to pick up. Basically, in every game of League of Legends, there are certain steps you must take to ensure victory, and these can vary between each game and even between each passing moment. You want to identify you and your team's win condition as soon as possible, but it is important to keep in mind that this can change throughout the course of the game. Whether it is securing Dragon Soul, getting your carry fed, or simply forcing the enemy top laner away from their minion farm, your win condition relies on balancing your priorities on your team's strengths and the enemy team's weaknesses. If you happen to fall behind in the game, this step is just as important, since it can be used to help regain a foothold in the game. You can only maintain your lead if you optimize each and every advantage and use them against your enemies.

Identifying Their Win Condition

It is just as important to identify your enemy's win condition as it is to identify your own, since this will be the enemy's chance in throwing you off of your lead. For example, if you have maintained a decent lead in kills and CS, but your enemy is about to secure Dragon Soul or a Rift Herald, it is key to stop them in their tracks and secure the objectives for yourself. Kills and CS will only get you so far if your enemy is able to secure objectives and siege against your turrets. Alternatively, if you are ahead in objectives but your enemy has been able to catch you off guard and stack up kills, they can easily start to win objectives for themselves and bring about your defeat. Following up with kill leads, if a particular enemy player has a substantial amount of kills and items, it is important to shut them down before they are able to carry their team, since a single fed champion can very well mean doom for you and your team.

If a certain enemy player can farm up and out scale you, be sure to do what you can to gain your advantage long before they can overpower you. As a follow-up to this, if a certain enemy player is a counter pick to someone on your team, you want to be able to assist them whenever possible so they cannot be defeated in one-on-one scenario. In order for your enemy to gain the advantage, they will have to look for your weaknesses and exploit them as much as they can, whether it is low vision in the jungle, poor communication and team work, or simply a player all alone in lane with nowhere to run.

Communication Is Key

It may seem silly, but League of Legends is in fact a team game, and you will only be able to win if you come together as one. Things like securing objectives, going in for a gank, or engaging on a team fight is all reliant on the communication between you and your team. If you try to go in for a gank, but your ally is unaware of your presence, you could easily miss out on the kill, or even get defeated by their enemy laner. It is important to communicate your intentions as often as you can so that your team can follow up and play them out accordingly. For example, after a successful team fight, you and your team should be communicating your next step, like going to secure an objective or maybe even returning to base to reset and spend Gold before the enemy starts to respawn. Without teamwork and communication, you could be making plays without proper back up, often resulting in an unnecessary death, which could eventually lead to your enemies winning fights and securing objectives.

Working together and helping each other out is an extremely strong method to winning the game, but it is not always the easiest. If your allies simply do not wish to keep up with the communication, do your best to keep them informed of your intentions and your enemy laner's intentions so that your allies can make their own decisions using your information. This can be done as simply as pinging when an enemy is missing, pinging when abilities and summoner spells have been used, or pinging when you catch an enemy out on a ward somewhere in the jungle.

To Summarize

Gaining the advantage and keeping up with it are some of the most important skills to learn in League of Legends. The easiest ways to perfect this skill is to always gather information on the enemy team and their actions, identify what steps you need to take to optimize your strengths, identify what your enemy can optimize on to turn the advantage against you, and to always keep up with team work and communication. Everyone has weaknesses, so it is important to use them to your advantage, whether it is an enemy player who is always over extended, a low vision in the jungle and around objectives, or a player who has used up all of their cool downs and has run out of ways to escape you.