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The Breakdown with Jatt: How SKT Wins Without Reliable Initiation

Riot·2/23/2017, 3:03:17 PM·1 votes·14,934 views

This week on The Breakdown, we're talking about how teams win games without reliable initiation.

World champions SK Telecom T1 are masters of this. In SKT's rematch against Samsung Galaxy in Week 5 of the 2017 LCK spring Split, without initiation, SKT still closed out the game -- thanks to their ability to pressure the map, create plays off of map movements, and force fights around objectives.

When most teams do this, they lose. Most teams also get torn apart by the community for picking a team composition with such a poor initiation. So while this is a somewhat abnormal example, it is a great game to study to watch SKT work their magic. They have almost no initiation -- and it doesn't matter.

Let's get into it. 

To watch the entire game, head over to the spoiler-free VODs page. For more details on the game, you can also see the detailed match history. 

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1 Comments

Archäen2/27/2017, 6:28:08 PM3 votes

Probably the weakest Breakdown yet... usually love these, but this one was pretty poor. If this game is used as the ideal, then the way to win without reliable initiation is to get the enemy team to make a poor initiation attempt. Though SKT played out the result well, the win had much more to do with SKT capitalizing on SSGs poor decisions than playing a low-engage comp correctly. If you're telling me that winning on a low-initiation comp requires the other team to make mistakes, then you should never play said comp.

While I agree with many of your points about low-initiation comps, I think this game was a poor example of how to play one effectively (meaning relying on your own pro-active play rather than the enemy team making mistakes).