One Simple but Extremely Powerful Tip to Improve Your Knowledge of Matchups and Lane Phase

Hello All,

Playing League of Legends and trying to climb we all face necessity of knowing our lane matchups, cooldowns, abilities, etc. And quite naturally you can think "what a shit! is it really possible to remember all this things?"

Yes, it is possible. And no, you don't need to sit and learn them hard like a nerd before exam in university. And here is my small tip which I hope will you help you:

Just start before each game note down on paper main information about you opponent's champion and review this info before next time you meet this champion.

Yes, that's it! Take some big peace of paper or notebook and start writing down information about new champion you meet: his cooldowns, if you don't know his skills in 1-2 key words mark his abilities, etc. During the game you can put some quick marks in 1-2 words as well if you want.

For example, you're playing mid and you first time meet Karthus in a game. Make a quick look on wiki his abilities and you will have something like this:

Karthus

• Q: dmg, 0.5 s cast, cd 1s
• W: wall, slowing, cd 18s
• E: AoE dmg, cd 0s
• R: global dmg, cd 200/180/160

Then next time you meet Karthus, if you feel unconfident, just look on this paper and you will instantly recover this information in your memory. As well, after the game sit for a moment and review op.gg / lolcounter + your game to put some more info in few words about specificaly your matchup.

Using this tip and keeping this paper/notebook near you during the time you will cover almost all opponents you meet on your lane (usually on each lane it will be up to 30 champions to cover 99,99% games — not so many paper needs) and what is the most important: you will start to remember this information!

Our brain is having the most insane memory during we're physically writting something. This is 1st step to know all your matchups and champions stats and skills. After few repeatings and reviewing of champions before games you will start to easily remember this information and you will see how big improvement you will achieve on laning phase. This information will be burned in your brain and you will start think "Carthus used his wall, I have 18s to punish him" even if you don't train do this specifically.

P.S. If we're talking about cooldowns, one of very important thing is cooldown reduction. If you have some time before game during loading screen, just not be very lazy, open an op.gg (better to have it open before), type an username of your lane opponent and check how he was playing on this champion before. Which runes he used and which masteries too. People used to use the same pages all the time so probability that something changed is quite low.

Hope this tip will help you to improve your knowledge about the game and improve your game itself!