League of Legends: Six Stats that Show Whether You Carried or Not

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League of Legends. Courtesy of Riot Games. /

3. Gold per minute

In my 50 tips to help climb ranked, I made the point of noting that CS and CS per minute numbers tend to be overrated compared to gold numbers. I found that to be true not just in the roles where you would expect CS to be less relevant (support, duh, and jungle) but even in top lane getting high CS per minute and CS leads early.

However, getting solid gold income is very good indication of whether you played well and have a better chance of winning. It makes sense because CS is an indicator of how good you’re doing at getting the free income available to you, but there are still several other ways players can get gold even if it means sacrificing their CS per minute.

4. Gold difference at 20

“Every game has a laning phase.” It’s oft-repeated advice because, well, it’s true. In every game, you’re going to be guaranteed to play at least (probably) 15-20 minutes before the game can realistically end. How you perform in those first 20 minutes of gameplay through CS, getting kills, getting towers, and the like, is all massively important especially when compared to your impact versus that of your lane opponent.

If you don’t believe me, there is a 90.9% correlation between your individual gold lead at 20 and winning the game. Note that this doesn’t just mean that having a gold lead at 20 means you’re 90% likely to win the game, but rather in games where you have a bigger gold lead at the 20-minute mark, you become more likely to win. This makes sense because bigger gold leads tend to be harder to throw and likely a large gold lead has also given your teammates more gold to overcome their poor performance

Another interesting fact is that in games where you tend to have disparate outcomes (for example games you play well in but lose or play badly in and win) these numbers tend to tell exactly the story you would expect. That is to say, in games where you play worse you’ll tend to have a larger gold deficit in the games that you win versus the ones you lose because your teammates are helping you dig yourself out of a hole. In games where you played well and lost, well, it probably was a slight case of your team dragging you down, but remember that these disparate outcome games as a very small minority of games.

That’s also why the 20-minute mark is the breakpoint here, rather than the 10 or 15-minute point. Having good gold differentials at that point in the game is valuable, yes, but can swing based on teammate’s performance. The first 20 minutes is an indication of how you played both your lane and the mid game, and whether you were able to translate your lane lead to a lead for your team. Here’s how your gold differential at 20 minutes (compared to your lane opponent so your gold minus enemy laner’s gold) affects your score.

Laners and junglers

-2500 GD @ 20 or greater = -3
-2499 to -1500 GD @ 20 = -2
-1499 to -500 GD @ 20 = -1
-499 to 499 GD @ 20 = +0
500 to 1499 GD @ 20 = +1
1500 to 2499 GD @ 20 = +2
2500 GD @ 20 or greater = +3

Supports

-1000 GD @ 20 or greater = -3
-999 to -600 GD @ 20 = -2
-599 to -300 GD @ 20 = -1
-299 to 299 GD @ 20 = +0
300 to 599 GD @ 20 = +1
600 to 999 GD @ 20 = +2
1000 GD @ 20 or greater = +3

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