Week 12: Reading a Game

The semester's closing question, answered with the semester's own tools — given a complete match, explain why one team won using resources, tempo, vision, objectives, draft and teamfighting together. Synthesises Weeks 1, 6, 8 and 10 rather than introducing a new concept.

10 May 2027

Guiding question#

Why did they win?

No new concept this week. Every tool from the semester is applied together to one complete, hypothetical match — the same Team A and Team B from Weeks 9 and 10.

Back to Week 1#

In Week 1 you wrote down an answer, in whatever language you had at the time, to “why did the winning team actually win?” for a match of your own. Answers like “their ADC got fed,” “they had more kills,” “they got Baron,” or “the other team threw” were treated as a fine starting point, not a wrong one. This week shows why they’re incomplete: each names a moment without explaining what made that moment possible, or what it was converted into afterward.

One match, traced as a causal chain#

This is not a recap of what happened. It’s a chain where each link is asked the same question: what did this advantage allow them to do next?

1. Draft (Week 9). Team A drafts to force fights before Team B’s poke-and-peel composition scales; Team B drafts to survive to that point. → This decides which resources and wave states each side needs early.
2. Lane and wave states (Week 3). Team A’s jungler paths toward a bot lane wave that’s been allowed to slow-push, and uses the crash to gank safely. → A safe gank window that existed only because of the wave.
3. Resources (Week 2). The gank converts into a kill and a turret plate — gold and a level advantage for two of Team A’s players. → Two players now hold items and levels their draft’s early-game plan depended on.
4. Jungle information (Week 5). Team B’s jungler, tracking a sighting of Team A’s jungler that is now several minutes stale, invades the wrong side of the map looking for a trade that isn’t there. → Team B loses tempo without a fight happening at all.
5. Tempo (Week 6). Team A’s team recalls together, banking the advantage into full item completions rather than chasing further kills. → They return to the map ahead in items, not just ahead on the scoreboard.
6. Vision (Week 7). With that tempo lead, Team A’s support gets deep river wards placed before the next contestable objective. → Team A now knows something Team B doesn’t: where it’s safe to commit.
7. Objectives (Week 8). Vision and the jungle-tracking failure both favour Team A; it contests the next Dragon with information Team B doesn’t have, while Team B — blind and already mistimed — can only concede. → An objective taken at low real risk, not a gamble.
8. Teamfight (Week 10). The Baron fight from Week 10 is this match’s fight. Team A’s engage lands cleanly because of the missing vision and the disengage tool already burned earlier — the fight was substantially decided before either side swung. → Team B’s win condition, its late-game marksman, is removed before it mattered.
9. Nexus. With Team B’s core threat gone and a Dragon soul stacked, Team A converts map control into Baron, then a lane push neither remaining Team B player can hold. → The win condition drafted in Week 9 finally pays off, nine steps later.

Week 1’s answer versus Week 12’s answer#

Week 1 answer: “Team A got a big early lead and it snowballed.”

Week 12 answer: Team A’s draft needed an early fight; a wave state handed it one; the resulting gold lead was banked into items rather than spent chasing more kills; that tempo bought vision Team B didn’t have; that vision made an objective contest low-risk instead of a gamble; and the resulting fight was decided by information and cooldowns from minutes earlier, not by anything that happened once the fight started. “It snowballed” was true. It was never the explanation.

Why did they win?#

Return to the question this course opened with. You now have the vocabulary to trace an answer through resources, waves, trades, tempo, information, objectives, draft and teamfighting, rather than stopping at the first plausible-sounding cause. That tracing — not any single concept on its own — is what this course has been teaching.