Injecting chaos into SKT's winning style
Whether it be Wuju, Hiten, the way of the Kinkou, or mindlessly whaling on someone with a six-foot sword (looking at you Tryndamere), Summoner's Rift is a showcase of martial styles and prowess. When it comes to strategic 5 vs. 5 play though, there has been a singular strategy that has long dominated the competitive scene.
Dubbed the "SKT-Style" by many an analyst and player, this methodical approach seeks to leverage small gains into victory by avoiding risk and out-rotating the enemy on the Rift. It's known as the SKT-Style because it has been mercilessly performed and perfected by long-standing international powerhouse SKTelecom T1. Long considered the correct way to play the game, it's about time that its metal be put to the test.
Enter the new Rift religion: Chaos. Characterized by its unpredictably and aggressiveness, this method exploits weakness in the established order by introducing a little...anarchy.
Ruthless Efficiency
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At its best, the SKT-Style leaves enemies pulling out their hair while audiences awe at its beauty.
It's coordinated to the utmost, with the jungler and support laying down vision and laners manipulating waves in preparation for moves that won't happen for a few minutes. Once a team has built their advantage through map pressure, they're able to split push their enemy to death in a 1-3-1 formation. Thanks to their superior vision control, they're then able to pick and choose their fights as they effortlessly migrate between lanes and neutral objectives, slowly drowning their enemy.
Long the strategic status quo, most teams have sought to emulate this methodical gameplay to ensure they find victory far more than defeat.
"I think the best way to start any team is to practice the fundamentals," says coach of H2k Gaming, Neil "Pr0lly" Hammad. "It's basically the foundation of all our wins, right now we don't get many surprise victories, and by 15 minutes our games are decided."
Enter the Chaos Theory
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With the SKT-Style becoming so ingrained in the competitive culture, the emergence of its polar opposite seems only natural.
Chaos simply deals with predictability in complex systems, in League that means using the SKT-Styles' structured behavior against itself.ahq e-Sports Club is an example of a team that excels in this regard, causing mayhem every time they step off the fountain.
In their Week 1 match against Machi, ahq repeatedly forced mid-game skirmishes with no macro-objectives up for grabs. After giving up the first Dragon and blowing jungler Xue "Mountain" Zhao-Hong's Flash, many teams would have conceded the lost objective and tried to apply pressure elsewhere on the map, but ahq do not obey the laws of reason.
If it's a fight that that they shouldn't take, then it's a fight their enemy won't expect. In this instance, ahq’s fearless top laner Chen "Ziv" Yi Teleported behind Machi, preventing them from escaping through the tri-bush. Ziv's Hecarim dished out as much damage as he could en route to the stables for the damned, buying time for the rest of ahq to follow up. The move was so unexpected that Machi did not deploy their own Teleport in rebuttal, because by the time they realized this was a fight, they had already lost.
While ahq went on to give up the first three Dragons, they never failed to make Machi pay for it after the fact. By aggressively forcing these skirmishes with nothing more than bloodlust on the line, ahq gradually built up a gold lead that Machi was unable to counter.
Aggressive Expansion
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This disruptive, hyper-aggressive, and unpredictable style has spread to regions in every corner of the world, and it's chief practitioners were seen preaching the word of chaos at this years 2015 Mid-season Invitational. With the best representatives of each style competing, it was a perfectly controlled atmosphere to test one against the other.
The Semifinals series between SKTelecom T1 and Fnatic was the most emblematic and illuminating fight between these two schools, with order just barely winning out in the end.
In Game 3, with the series tied at 1-1, Fnatic accrued a 5K gold lead including three turrets to the nil of SKTelecom, but were unable to transition their aggressive, skirmish heavy mid game into concrete objectives.
The caveat to this chaotic style, is that you paint yourself into a corner. With a team composition that was not built to siege, Fnatic opted into an inadvisable dive at the 22-minute mark, giving SKTelecom an edge back into the game. Similarly to a life of crime, its very difficult to turn clean once you've committed yourself to the ways of the darkside.
The final battle
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Game 5 proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the SKT-Style still reigns supreme, and no one performs it better than SKTelecom themselves. By prioritizing caution in the early mid game, SKTelecom successfully stifled the attempts of Fnatic to gain an early edge. SKTelecom jungler Bae "Bengi" Seoung-ung's Sightstone Nunu highlighted the importance of vision in countering aggressive moves by Fnatic, prompting caster Christopher "MonteCristo" Mykles to question, "Where was this the rest of the series?"
MSI was the first real test, but it certainly won't be the last. The chaotic style needs to be refined a bit, to capitalize more on its unpredictability and substitute hyper-aggression for calculated aggression.
Pr0lly hopes to craft a strategy that combines the two, "The only way to have consistency is to have a method to it, but it's unique enough to not be predictable. Might be a pipedream...but in my head it's awesome."
Now that the Summer season is underway, teams of both schools of thought have returned to their respective regions to sharpen their spears, hone their arrows, and prepare for the next round -- Worlds.
Schuyler Winter once boarded a moving train leaving Nairobi. He loves discussing all things Lolesports and you should totally hit him up on Twitter. And here he is talking about himself in the third person. Now that, that is chaos theory.
