How to review your League of Legends games: a 5-step method

1. Pick the right game, while it’s fresh

The best game to review is the one you just played. You still remember what you were thinking, and that is half of what a review needs: the recording shows what you did, your memory tells you why.

Choose a game where you had a say in the result. A stomp, either way, teaches little. A close game, or a loss where you felt you could have changed something, is full of decisions worth checking.

Watch it from your own point of view: your camera, your minimap, your health bar. A free camera over the whole map shows what you could not see at the time, and makes every decision look obvious. Give it twenty to thirty minutes — one game reviewed properly teaches more than five skimmed at double speed.

2. List the moments that mattered, deaths first

Before judging anything, note the moments that changed the game. Start with your deaths. Each one hands the enemy gold and experience, takes you off the map for a while, and often costs your team a tower or an objective. They are also the easiest moments to find.

Then add the fights and objectives around you: a dragon taken without you, a tower lost while you farmed the other side. Stop at five or six moments. A list of twenty means you will skim them all. A useful list looks like this:

• 6:06 — died alone in the river after our dragon.
• 13:40 — used Flash to engage; nobody followed.
• 22:15 — caught in their jungle with a big bounty.

3. Pause before the decision, not after

This is the step most players skip. When you watch a death, you already know how it ends, and that knowledge colours everything: of course you should not have walked there, their jungler was waiting. But you did not know that at the time.

So rewind to a few seconds before the decision — the moment you chose to walk forward, to stay, to engage — and pause. Judge only what existed then. A good decision can end badly, and a bad one can get away with it; judging by the outcome teaches you to fear bad luck and to repeat good luck.

At the pause, answer three questions, out loud or on paper: where was I going, why, and what did I expect the enemy to do?

4. Ask what your screen showed

Now look at the paused frame like a detective. Almost everything you needed was on your screen; the real question is whether you used it.

• The minimap. How many enemies were visible? Who had been missing for a while, and where were they last seen?
• Health and mana. Yours, your allies’, the visible enemies’. Were you about to fight at half health?
• Your summoner spells and key abilities. Was your Flash up? Your escape?
• The wave and the objectives. Was your wave about to crash into a tower? Was an objective about to come up?
• Your team. Who could actually reach you in time?

Then write the alternative: what you could have done instead, with that information. Be concrete. “Fall back toward my blue-side jungle” is something you can do next time; “play safer” is not.

5. Leave with one rule for your next game

A review that ends with ten notes changes nothing: in the middle of a game you will remember none of them. Look at your moments and find what repeats. Three of your five probably share a cause.

Turn that cause into one short rule you can check in a second while playing. Gankademy’s missions are written this way — for example:

• “Big bounty: never enter fog alone.”
• “Down a player? Don’t contest — trade elsewhere.”
• “Before you engage, check your team can follow. If not, wait.”

Play your next three games with that one rule in mind, then check whether it held. When it holds several games in a row, it is becoming a habit: pick the next one. Our guide to climbing in solo queue lists ten habits worth working on this way.

Four traps that make a review useless

• Blaming teammates. You cannot change their decisions, only yours. Review your own screen.
• Judging by the outcome. The most common trap: see step 3.
• Reviewing only losses. A win also hides decisions that worked by luck.
• Watching at high speed. You will see what happened, never why.

With Gankademy

Gankademy is a Windows app that applies this method to your own games. With recording on, it records your screen while you play, on your PC. About a minute after the game, your debrief gives that game a score and tells you what became of your three missions.

When you ask for a coach analysis, it picks your key moments, deaths first, and judges each decision with only what existed before it: frames and clips that stop before the decision, and Riot’s match data cut at that second. Every claim is checked against the game’s facts and your minimap, and a claim the facts contradict is dropped. What you get is a short Final Review film, narrated by the coach you pick: the decision, a pause on what you could see, the outcome, an arrow to where you could fall back, and up to three rules for your next game. See the film.

Questions