After every League of Legends tournament, there will be people taking a look at how many games were won by the blue team and the red one. And commonly, the wins won’t be evenly split, with one side winning noticeably more often than the other. The players are very much aware of it as well, and in most tournaments, teams will almost always pick the same side whenever offered side selection.

So, where does this disparity come from? And is it only affecting pro play, or does one side give an advantage in casual play as well? Let’s find out!

The Pro Play Aspect: Draft Pick Differences

This is the obvious first point to look at, as champion selection straight up works differently for both teams.

Pro play, as well as other tournaments, use the tournament draft, a style of champion selection that differs from the one used in normal and ranked queues.

This makes the blue team get the first champion pick, while the red team has the advantages of choosing the first champion after the second round of bans and of having the last pick.

Which side this favors depends on the meta and changes over time. More often than not, being able to pick first has been more advantageous than what the red team gets. In patches where one champion is plainly stronger than the rest, it’s the red team that’s forced either to ban it, or to come up with a specific strategy to beat it, if said strategy exists. So the blue team gets an exclusive pass on a strong champion, or can make use of one more flex ban than their opponents.

This was pushed to an extreme at Worlds 2015, where both Gangplank and Mordekaiser were absurdly strong, and teams also believed one to be stronger than the other. If one was banned, the blue side was awarded an unbeatable champion; and if both made it through the ban phase, the blue team would still receive the king’s share of the bargain.

As a result, the red team was forced to spend two of their bans on these two champions and were only left with a single ban to flex for their game plan. Only a few teams elected to ban one of the S-tier characters on the blue side.

Generally speaking, the first pick also allows to get the best champion left, can be used to further deny one role, and prevents the red side from trying to fully ban out one lane in the first rotation as they will wind up affected even more (provided even champion pools).

On the other hand, the red side has more flexibility in the second round of the draft, and while there are other benefits in play, their main advantage is to be granted the final pick, allowing them to have a guaranteed counterpick, an answer to the opponents’ composition, and a hidden pick that cannot be responded to.

However, all of these aspects only affect pro play, as this champion selection does not even exist in matchmade queues. And while regular draft does also provide the respective advantages of first pick and last pick, their impact is insignificant compared to pro play where the draft is actually thought out.

The Camera and Interface Asymmetry

While the map differs between blue and red side, differences in ease of access to Dragon or Baron and in lane safety do affect gameplay but wind up providing neither team with a relevant advantage. The benefits and inconveniences either are too specific or cancel one another out.

Where an advantage is actually gained, however, is the visibility.

All players have their HUD take up the same amount of space on the screen, naturally. But that doesn’t make it occupy the same quantity of useful space for either side - all the opposite.

On the blue team, the HUD is placed where the allies are. In practice, the information that it covers is relatively unimportant, and much of it can already be seen on the minimap as well.

But when playing on the red team, the interface is where the opponents are. Champions, minions, turrets - all of this information is located where the HUD is also placed. And playing without having them fully visible doesn’t work, to the point where we’ll always try to put the camera back around them.

Yet that’s where the second part of the problem comes in. The player’s character being partially covered by the interface doesn’t hinder the comprehension of the situation. But part of it being off the screen is a different story, and our brains can’t work with that quite as well.

Putting those two together, the result is that in practice, players of the blue team can have a bit more information on their screen. And moving the camera in the opponents’ direction also takes ever so slightly longer for the red side, as a red player’s cursor will be further away from the bottom-left corner than a blue player’s from the top-right.

In most instances, this will not matter, and all that there is to see fits on the screen either way.

And yet, sometimes it does, and once we’re aware of this disparity, we start noticing that these situations where the red side disadvantage matters crop up more than they would seem.

Are All Champions Affected the Same?

In the end, the camera and interface placement does end up mattering, and that is reflected in the win rates - looking at the blue and red side win rates, the former is almost always higher, sometimes by a noticeable margin.

Not all champions are equally disadvantaged by being on the red team, having to do with their kit and also their role in the game.

On average, champions have their win rate higher by 1.5 points on the blue side. And many of them see a difference of 2 points or more.

As a rule of thumb, champions with long-range linear skillshots or targeted abilities are hindered the most by the reduced visibility (such as Jhin, Xerath, Senna, or Lux). Are also notably affected the ones that want to chase down their opponents with basic attacks (Kog’Maw, or solo lane Twisted Fate), and the ones who like to spend their time on the edge of the turret range (Leona, or Aatrox, the latter having one of the starkest win rate drops when played by the red team).

On the other hand, the champions that care less about the side of the map they play on are the ones with area-based skillshots (like Miss Fortune or Cho’Gath), and the ones that tend to take the action up close and personal (Evelynn or Malphite, for two examples). These see little to no difference in win rate based on the side they play for.

Overall, all performance differences range between 0 and 2.8 points in favor of the blue side, with Aatrox isolating himself at 3.5 points, meaning that while there definitely is a disadvantage, it isn’t worth adapting one’s picks over.

And then, there’s the case of Rumble.

Rumble’s relation to what part of the Rift he plays on is significant enough to warrant making a dedicated point about it. Ever since his release, his win rate on the blue side has always been higher by an entire 6 points.

Supposedly, that would be because of his ultimate. The Equalizer takes slightly longer to aim at long range when located top-right of the targets, and casting it around max range in that direction may require no longer having Rumble on screen for a short time, leaving him vulnerable to being caught unawares for a period of time that, albeit small, doesn’t exist on the blue team.

This is an issue that Riot is aware of. The champion will always be too strong on the blue side, too weak on the red side, or both at once. But they’ve stated that while they are aware of it, there also seems to exist no solution for it - barring completely altering the game by adopting the mirrored camera that Wild Rift uses.

Attempting to cast the same, mirrored Equalizer, Rumble can see a lot more when on the blue team.

Is There No Upside to Being on the Red Team?

By default, playing on the red side is a strict disadvantage. Certainly not a major one, but it creates numerous tiny inconveniences that the blue side doesn’t have to deal with, and that add up to the point of mattering.

But in order to offset that, Riot has made it so that of the two teams, the one that has the higher average MMR (in other words, the stronger team) will always play as the red team. This, however, does not affect all skill brackets equally. For the vast majority of the playerbase, this fact does not change anything.

The two teams in a game almost always have the same MMR, and “the team with the higher MMR” means that the blue squad has an average MMR of 1800 while that of the red one is 1802.

Imbalance, for almost every player, comes from players performing above or below their average as well as being on roles they are more or less comfortable with, neither aspect being reflected in MMR and as such being weighed in the attribution of the sides.

It’s only in the areas of low population that this factor starts having an impact. Meaning, the lowest and highest skill brackets. As there are fewer players to pick from, the games cannot end up being as balanced as with a practically infinite player pool, and the resulting skill disparity will always be solved in favor of the red side. And as fewer people are online during that time, playing at night also makes this aspect more relevant.

Factoring everything together, the red team wins more often in Iron and in the Apex tiers - and by several percentage points, even.

Everywhere else, all the way between Bronze and Diamond, the blue team wins more often. The difference appears all of a sudden where the player pool drastically shrinks.

Is There a Side Disparity in ARAM As Well?

There is, and even to an extreme degree. On the Howling Abyss, the blue team has its win rate higher by 6 points, at 53%. While no explanation has ever been confirmed for that, the most likely one is that it’s still the camera question but taken to an extreme. Spending the entire game avoiding the skillshots of five opponents while trying to land one’s own, keeping track of their positions and of all details at all times, a higher visibility becomes all the more important in this position.

Typically, a Xerath is even more likely to be outside his opponents’ fields of vision while he’s depleting their health bars if he’s on the blue team - and the more high-range champions on the bridge at once, the higher the impact of the side.

In ARAM, each champion has a win rate higher by 5 to 7 points on the blue side. (And then, once again, there’s Rumble, winning games 27% more often while being in the blue team.)

However, in ARAM, there is no adaptation to be had either way, as side selection isn’t known until the game starts. So, all there is to do with this fact is to accept it and play with it. It is important to remember that while relevant, none of these differences are drastic.

Conclusion

Pro players value one side of the Rift more based on the meta, but what makes that side stronger for them has no effect on us regular players. On the other hand, for all of us, the blue team is made stronger by the camera and the position of the interface on the screen, which Riot attempts to make up for by having the stronger team take the red side.

And you now know all that there is to know about the influence of side selection in League of Legends!