nand
<Member>
<Member>
What I personally do it retreat through the jungle, and stay at the very very furthest tip of brushes so I can get a good headstart if I see somebody, allowing us to retreat without them even knowing we were there.
I then run back to my lane *behind* my tower so my opponent won't know where I came from, usually just in time to score the very first last hit on the foremost minion.
The problem here is that junglers usually exclusively start at the blue buff, especially if they take smite - so it can be very easy to guess where they are.
I then run back to my lane *behind* my tower so my opponent won't know where I came from, usually just in time to score the very first last hit on the foremost minion.
The problem here is that junglers usually exclusively start at the blue buff, especially if they take smite - so it can be very easy to guess where they are.
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A while back, I wrote about the game theory behind dodging skill shots like Morgana’s Dark Binding snare. It occurred to me that there’s a similar game being played with protecting junglers at the start of a match, so I’m here to discuss that today.
Here’s a common practice, especially in low ELO games. You have a jungler on your team, and he wants to start at the blue buff. Naturally, he does not want to be on the short end of a large gank, so he asks for protection. If you are the bottom team, this entails the solo top lane and mid lane standing in the river or near the north entrance to the blue buff, looking for incoming enemy champions. If you are the top team, then it is a similar story, except you can enlist the help of both of the bottom laners.
However, eventually minions spawn, and your preferences change. Standing guard for your jungler while minions fight and die means you miss out on precious experience points, which ruins one of the benefits of having a jungler in the first place. This tradeoff with experience points seems to come up frequently.] So rather than just staying in the river, your teammates go back to their respective lanes.
Yet many players go about this in the entirely wrong way. Let’s say you are the top team, and you just stood guard at your blue buff. But now you have to go lane bottom. Everyone knows that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, so you travel down the river and show up to start farming some gold. Efficient strategy, right?
Perhaps, but I don’t think it is a particularly good one. Think about what I will infer from your behavior if I am on the other team. Well, Rammus has Smite, so you definitely have a jungler on your team. Junglers demand protection, and you don’t really have any other reason to be running from the river, so it is a pretty safe bet that your Rammus is at the blue buff. Thanks to your indiscretion, my team can now plot an assault on Rammus, as we know exactly where he is. We might not kill him, but we will force him to retreat at the very least. And any time you can ruin a rival’s jungling plan, you are in great shape to win.
So what’s the game theory behind this? Well, such a game of hide and seek can be roughly approximated by something called “matching pennies.” I discuss the idea and optimal strategy of the game in this video:
Basically, you need to keep your opponent guessing. If you always select the same strategy, then your opponent will know the precise countermeasure to defeat you. The trouble is, just about no one plays this right. So whenever I see someone running down the river, I almost always correctly infer the location of their jungler. As such, we go harass him and start the match off on a good note.
If players were not always so predictable (that is, if they were playing in an equilibrium), then you should not be able to infer anything from their behavior here. This is why, for example, I am very careful when returning mid not to run through the bushes but rather the small passage between the bushes and my turret. When I meet my mid opponent, he will think I just game from standing behind my turret, and therefore he cannot infer anything from my behavior.
That being said, I occasionally go one step further. Since players don’t really mix their strategies properly (again, with the qualifier that this at least seems to be the case in low ELO games), we can actually use this to our advantage by inducing them to believe something incorrect. So instead of returning through the passage between the mid bushes and mid turret, I will run to the other side (where our red buff is), and then enter through the bushes on that side. If you can get your solo top to do something similar, you will sometimes sell to your opponents that you have a jungler on that side, even though he is on the other side of the map. It is hilarious to watch the rival mid player activate Ghost and go running off into the jungle to chase some phantom that you led him to believe was real.
So the next to you try to protect a jungler, think about what kind of information your opponents will infer based off of your behavior. Whatever you do, don’t give away the position of your jungler. And if you are really tricky, make them look foolish by inferring something wrong.