Hey guys.

League is a complex game, and you can find yourself playing a lot but not knowing where or what to improve on. There are three main fundamentals that you need to work on as a beginner.

As usual, you can find the video version below, and well as a link to the rest of my guides.

1. Farming.

• This is your bread and butter, and the most important takeaway. This is the main way (supports excluded but it’s good to learn) to gain gold. Blindly hitting minions and hoping you get lucky and actually kill the minion (you only get the gold from minions if you kill them yourself) is a habit you need to get out of immediately. Only last hitting minions actually gives you gold, so your focus should be on that (this is referred to as csing). Does this mean you should never touch the minions except to cs? No, that’s where fundamental number 3 comes in.
• Farming well is important in order to buy your items and have a gold lead on the enemy, thereby giving you more power and helping you kill them and win the game. But what is considered farming well you may ask? Well, it depends. As a beginner, my advice is to look at the cs per minute (cpm) you currently score (so if you get 12 cs in 6 minutes, thats 2 cpm) and try to increase it. Practice tool is a great way to go into game and work on timing last hits. It will be harder in game but try to aim for 5-6cpm. This should be sufficient to take you all the way to silver and maybe even gold. A widely accepted number for a very good cpm is 10. I wouldn’t really worry about hitting that number for now though.
• With good and efficient farm, you’re able to outrace your opponent to completing your items, which brings me to my second fundamental.

2. Understand Power Spikes

• What is a power spike? It’s when you through one mean or another significantly increase in power. There are smaller spikes but I’m going to focus on the main 2. hitting level 6, and completing an item. Hitting level 6 unlocks your ultimate, a huge source of power for most champions. Understanding when and how you hit level 6 is crucial if you’re looking to fight or skirmish. If you have level 6 and your opponent doesn’t, that’s a really good time to take a fight. Inversely, maybe don’t fight if you havent hit 6 and your lane opponent has. (levels 11 and 16 are when you get more ppoints into your ultimate but arent as big of a spike).
• Item completions are massive spikes in power. Having all the component to demonic embrace for example is nowhere near as powerful as actually completing the item. Completing items and fighting around times where you have a completed item and your opponent doesn’t will give you a major advantage in a fight. And now we tie in farming and why it’s by far the number one fundamental. If you farm better than your opponent, you will finish your item faster, meaning you hit your power spike faster and can now bully the opponent, maybe even kill him, and further accelerate you to level 11 (your ultimate upgrade), and further allow you to snowball even more by getting more kills, cs, towers, neutral objectives like dragons and scuttle crabs, and enemy jungle camps. It’s a big cycle of winning.

3. Understanding lane control

• This is the hardest of the three, but don’t worry, it gets easy with time and experience. Lane control refers to how you position the minion waves in the lane, and is a very complex topic, but even at a basic level, it will greatly increase your farming (everything ties in together). The basic lane control I want to explain is pushing and stacking waves. Let’s say you want to base because you have the exact amount of gold to buy your completed item. Where do you want the minion wave to be?
• To answer this, lets think about it in reverse. When you come back to lane, do you want the minion wave to be on the opponents side of the lane, on your side, or in the middle? Additionally, do you want the enemy minions to die while you are in base, or for them to stay alive so you can come back and farm them?
• The answer to these questions should be that you want the wave on your side of the lane, so you can cs them safely and not have to overextend. You also would ideally want the minions to have survived long enough that when you get to lane, you havent missed any minions. How do you achieve that?
• One way is to crash a wave into the enemy tower. You do this by hitting the enemy minions as fast as you can in order to push the wave into the tower, and then you can base. By the time you come back to lane, the enemy minions will have grouped up, gotten more reinforcements than your minions (because your minions will die to the enemy tower) and will be marching on towards your tower. You’ll be just in time to catch the wave and cs all or almost all the minions (example here).
• When you most definitely NOT want to back is when the minions are just about to crash into your tower, because by the time you make it back from base, you will have lost ALL the gold and XP from the minions (example here). Understanding this will help you control the wave and get better back timers, losing less in the process and increasing your farm, gold earned, and xp, letting you snowball even further.
• You might be thinking, well this is useless for jungle and support! And to that I’d say no! Knowing the lane state means you can tell when the enemy is gankable or not, as well as understanding the likely movements of your enemy. A deeper dive into lane control will reveal many things that are useful to supports and junglers, but that’s for another day.

Link to the video guide can be found here, as well as all my other guides here