Transcription
Do you feel like in solo Q that so many games are just thrown away? No matter how fed you get from farming that zoo animal of a lane opponent, there's even those games where your teammates play relatively well in the beginning, but it still feels like somebody's going to throw it away. Somebody gets caught out, forces a weird engage. Therefore, the game gets thrown completely back to the enemy team, making these games feel completely out of your control.
But what if I told you there is one extremely important and pretty simple piece of midame macro I guarantee you haven't heard before that is going to make these games much more in your control? But before we break down some examples, it's important for you to understand one thing. There is a massive difference in the value of neutral objectives. I know everyone loves to get chubbed up for a good dragon fight, but most of these objectives such as dragon, rift herald, void grubs, they actually don't make that big of a difference in terms of winning that solo Q game.
Therefore, in most cases, it's best to view it as winning this objective fight is much more valuable than getting the objective itself. Think in this situation, who's better off? If one team steals the second air dragon off you, but in return you win the fight. They lose their jungler, their mid, their AD carrying, and afterwards you can push out all the waves, eat all their camps, and get that first base off to maintain good tempo. Of course, your team is going to have a much higher chance of winning that game even though the enemy team stole the dragon that you are fighting for in the first place.
But subconsciously, everyone seems to make the connection that dragons are super important because in most cases, you lose that fight and the dragon. So, you've made this connection in your mind that the game feels super difficult because we lost dragon. When in reality, it's because you lost that team fight around the objective, not the objective itself. However, three objectives are exceptions to this rule. And that's Baron, Dragon Soul, and Elder Dragon. Any other objective that you can think of, we can give. We can trade it off. But these ones, if you give them, you are going to really struggle to win that game.
Therefore, because I kept seeing this problem happening time and time again, I created a brand new fundamental for my students that I'm going to be sharing with you today. And that is Baron intensity. Baron intensity is a skill I picked up on from living in Korea for over a year now playing Korean solo Q with some of the best players in the world. And it essentially means no matter how fed you are or how good or bad your teammates are playing, when Baron is on the table, every single click, every single decision you make in that game must be related to securing and playing for that objective. Although make sure to keep in mind whenever I mention Baron Intensity, I also mean Dragon Soul and Elder, the big three. But Baron is up every single game that you play. And to be completely honest, I couldn't think of a better name. So just bear with me on this one.
Now, it's important for you to understand the value of the big three is just so much higher than any other objective. You would not believe how many games I've seen students playing in master tier, emerald, silver, you name it, where they obliterate lane. They're a zero carrying a bunch of dragon fights, putting the team on their back. But then at around 22 minutes or so, they go bottom, push out a wave, and this gives the enemy team an opportunity to make a pick on whatever teammate is throwing the game away that game, and secure the Baron for themselves.
But this isn't actually 100% your teammate's fault for getting caught out there. What if I told you it's also your fault that this keeps happening time and time again, and this concept applies to every single role and elo bracket. It is vital to understand that when playing for objectives, the team that gets to the area first and gains control has a massive advantage. But this advantage is even more significant when it comes to the big three such as Baron. The reason being, it's typically okay to trade the other objectives away. If you break the bottom tier 2 and deny a bunch of farm and in return the Rift Herald, not really the end of the world. Or if you're a jungler and you eat all the enemy bot cams and dive the enemy solo laner on that bottom tower, again, a very solid play to make. But when it comes to Baron, that is just not an option. You must contest this objective. The game will just be completely ruined if you give it to them. Even if you gain a lot of individual resources in exchange, therefore, if you have the option to contest the big three, you have to do it every single time.
So, what this means is the team that gets to Baron first to gain control has such a massive advantage because the enemy team is basically forced to fight you with no vision whatsoever. So, if you're playing a control mage like Syndra or great flankers like Kenan, Lee, and Alistar, this means your opponent is forced to fight you without knowing where any of these champions are. Therefore, you have such a massive advantage in such a highstakes team fight.
But I definitely should warn you, whenever I first teach a student the skill of Baron Intensity, they usually start out by thinking, "Okay, that means when Baron spawned, let's go there straight away and start slapping it down with the boys and rush it." That isn't what I mean at all. Baron Intensity is all about control. It's less about the Baron buff itself and more about creating a favorable situation where it's unlikely for your team to get caught up because you're there because you're getting vision for them. But that means it's very likely for you to make picks on the enemy team. All it takes is one bozo to try to push top wave when they're not allowed to dash forward on mid or face check your vision. And they're basically signing Baron over to you in their will. Think how many bozos do you usually have on your team per game? At least one to five. So, they are guaranteed to have at least one on their team that's going to give you either the Baron or a favorable fight around it.
Therefore, no matter what role you're playing, make sure you're getting your waves pushed out, getting your camps eaten ahead of time, and trying to make sure your team is the first one at that baron. Get your teammates involved. There is a very good chance you aren't playing with T1. Therefore, you must strongly communicate your intention. Drive that bus with strong pings. No, not a baron is alive or on my way guys ping. That is sackless communication. On my way, on my way, all in. All in. All in. If somebody's not listening, if someone's not on the bus, ping directly on top of their head. Assist me and then assist me onto the Baron. No bystander effect allowed here. Make sure your team knows we are playing for this Baron. This has given me so much success in solo cube and turned around or closed out so many games that I otherwise would have lost. And although I strongly believe this is one of the most important pieces of midame macro you could even add to your gameplay in, it's not going to be easy. So if you want to be coached by me personally, I recommend joining the top lane academy to speed up that improvement.
But moving on, here I have a quick example from a recent solo Q game where I executed Baron Intensity extremely well. As you can tell by the kill score up top, this game could go either way. One throw where my team gives a baron to the enemy or somebody gets caught out and the game will be in their control. But the reverse applies for us as well. So, what I'm looking to do right now is just push out bot wave, get my chore done, and TP to this baron as soon as possible. But that's the key word right there, as soon as possible. Not after my team gets control. Not after I see the fight start. I want to teleport here instantly. Help my team get that control and engage on them if they ever walk in. If they're not walking in, we going to start the Baron. And as you can see, very strong communication here. Getting my teammates involved. Making sure we're on the baron first and putting the enemy team on the back foot. Now they're in a situation where we have to engage on them or they're going to get baron. They are forced to fight us in our vision control on the back foot. We have all the momentum because we got here first from my TP, from my strong pings, getting everybody on the same page. We're able to create a extremely favorable situation and speed up the game and close it out a lot quicker than if I were to just sit bottom and wait for something to happen.
But at this point, I probably know what you're thinking. Coach, you're playing these games in Korean Challenger. There's no way my Emerald or Silver teammates will listen to my pings here. They're way too scared of Baron. And even though I completely understand where you're coming from, that's just not real whatsoever. But for this, I want to show you, not tell you. So, I've prepared a bunch of different examples from students of all different ELO brackets who I've taught Baron Intensity to, and they've had great results executing it in their games.
Now, I quickly want you to take a look at the game state in this example. You can see our students team is actually losing this game. This is not a concept where you have to be winning to execute Baron Intensity. So, you can see here with strong pings getting here early, he gained full control of this jungle. He actually has TP in this situation, but he knows me being here helping your control and being instantly ready to kill them when they walk in is much more valuable than pushing out bot wave because teleport takes time to arrive. So actually being here first, having your presence known and engaging on them the split second you can is much more valuable than minmaxing your farm, especially when it comes to Baron, Soul Elder, any of those massive objectives. So you can see here from a losing position, the game-winning play was made because the enemy team just can't function into full control. Either you face check our full vision or you're going to give us Baron, you can really put them in an uncomfortable position if you execute it like our student did.
But in my experience, coaching a wide variety of people, typically emerald players have a decent understanding of the game. On the other hand, players in silver or below typically lack that game understanding. So what if we try Baron Intensity in silver elo bracketed games? in this next example is exactly that. Now, if we were to quickly check in on the game state, you can see our students having a banger of a game. But 99% of silver players in his position wouldn't know how to close out this game. They would most likely go bottom and play for their bot tier, too. But that always has the risk of your team getting caught and throwing away that Baron. But you can see Johnny completely understands Baron intensity. He's pinging his teammates directly onto their head, getting the misfortune ready. She wanted to make some weirdo bot play. She didn't understand the macro. She didn't understand her job here, but Johnny did. He communicated it strongly. He got here early. And I promise you, if you're having a great game like Johnny here, and you communicate what to do in advance, nine times out of 10, your teammates will be on the same page and you can close out the game cleanly.
So now you see it works well even in lower ELO brackets. But it's important for you to understand it to a deeper level. It's not always going to be as simple as rock up to the Baron first with some pings and you're going to magically win the game. It's going to take some practice 100% and it's not going to work every single time. Just like how not every single game is winnable, not every macro play or team fight can be won 100% of the time. But I promise you across a 100 games, if you execute and understand this concept well, you will have a massive advantage over the rest of the players in your games.
So for the execution itself behind Baron Intensity, what I want you to visualize is every role has little chores and you need to do these chores in the mid game before grouping up and fighting. So for top lane, we need to push out bottom, the opposite side of Baron. For jungle, we need to eat all those delicious gromps and wolves running around before you want to go topside, getting that botside quadrant cleared out. But for mid and AD carry, you guys have it easy. You of course push out the mid and the top waves, the two waves closest to Baron, and you push it out as far as you feel safe. That's the most important part of this. And for support, you guys can just hover mid until your jungler is ready. Then holding their hand, you start getting that control down, rocking up to the top side jungle, getting vision down, sweeping out their wards. Ideally with the help of mid and AD carry hovering you and then top either premoving towards that objective or having that trigger finger ready to go on the teleport. If you don't have teleport, you need to be there. The goal is to gain full control of that jungle. That is the job of all five players at this point in the game. Basically every single game, regardless of what champions you're playing.
Although, like we mentioned before, your teammates are not T1. It's solo Q. There's no way your teammates are all going to know what to do perfectly every single time. I completely agree with this. Even in Challenger, there's going to be games where I have off rollers or even worse than that, people who play Kane. There's no way they're going to know how to play the game. But pings are extremely powerful. If you do the right thing individually and communicate what we're playing for with a high sense of urgency, your teammates will follow suit. Maybe not straight away. Sometimes they might finish a jungle camp or recall to get their item, but if you keep at it, if you keep communicating with that urgency what we're playing for and you're doing the right things individually, you will get the result you're playing for in most cases. Even with that emerald shooting example that we took a look at earlier, that was the second time he tried Baron Intensity in that game alone. His doggy jungler was going for a walk the first time he tried it and he didn't join in on the Baron play. But the student understood this is the best play to close out this game cleanly and he persevered until he created that game winning Baron fight that he was looking for.
Therefore, you need to remember I call it Baron intensity for a reason. I don't call it play for Baron. You must have intensity when playing for this objective. It's not going to go perfectly every single time, but it's the best way to close out games and of course come back from losing game states as well. So, next time you find yourself in a big solo Q game, pushing yourself to climb to the next rank and you see that clock in 19 minutes, sit up straight, lock in. I want to see you sweat for that Baron control and create the game-winning fight. Remember, it's called Baron intensity. If the back of your gaming chair isn't dripping with sweat by the end of that Baron sequence, you're doing something wrong.