today I found myself playing against a pretty good lee sin in customs draft

I'm unranked

There were a bunch of plats, but really I have no idea what level he may have been. It didn't really matter, he repeatedly found oppourtunities to do me in.

But instead of crying salty tears I tried my best to recall everything I've learned in my [since ahri's release date] years of experience and came up with a strategy as well as realizing a mistake I made in my itemization and summoner spells due to the many shyvanna guides I've read.

I went but this was that one match I should have known to go

realizing my mistake I found another job in intercepting lee sin's plays since he had a kindof strong earlygame in theory. Repeatedly I ruin his ganks and give lissandra chances to make plays or escape from bad positions. I also notice that due to the effective cooldown on yasuo's enhanced Q that even when behind I can go farm and be back in time for at least half of his ready states for launching his ult, if he committed id be there to peel and possibly counterattack. Unfortunately lee pretty much had the same idea but since I was playing shyv he couldn't just instaburst me and I just took advantage of that instead, which I could have done even harder with this "not default" build path I was regretting not using in the very scenario a diamond player's guide once warned me about.

Midmatch Lee sin came to invade and kill me and I had about figured out his pattern but I accidentally secondguessed myself and went to face check a bush thinking i'd have time to respond if I saw him but he arrived to ward just as I entered the bush because I had started the jungle camp first instead of making sure it was safe and trusting my intuition.. I'm a mid main.. cant remember if I died here or not but top came and lee had run away without getting red.

Judging from his play pattern I got a vision ward and went back to place it at my red and saw that my blue was up. I needed to adopt a more aggressive strategy to keep my laners safe till lee sin's power spike wore off so instead of worrying about blue I put a true sight ward in my red bush. This established that he no longer had vision in my jungle as far as I could tell and I had vision at least of this area. I was playing shyv and had built . Lee sin was either probably gonna steal my blue or expect to harass me at blue, come back to get red knowing i'd just blocked his vision of red, or he'd go after my laners. So I warded and just did red for now because I'm playing shyv and she can clear that pretty quick with an item and then I went to check the bush in mid seeing yasuo get aggressive when lee shows up to in my jungle. I figure he may be able to see me so I head back up and I can see where he went along with top, he used his q to go through a wall to the rood doods and was now trapped because of strategic ward placement and then caught with his pants down despite being fed.

We got his bounty and proceeded to find some success until my bronze botlane friend inevitably screwed up along with the adc and we went back to square one. What's important there though is that after lee sin died there was a window during which I could make plays against players who at least sortof knew what they were doing and I gained valuable experience.

This happened because

1. I study the game (reading the guides and whatnot) even if I don't always follow the advice i'll understand why things happened the way they did. Attempting to learn from people who are better at something than you will accomplish nothing if you don't first learn the fundamentals and study at least some so you can understand what else you could have done and if its considered normal or even viable in any meta

2. I didn't waste time crying salty tears. This one is very important. Salty tears wont teach you how to counterplay something. Lee sin set me behind somewhat but using my champions advantages over lee sin I was able to counteract his plays. With even better understanding of the jungle or lee sin himself I could probably have done it even better and probably will next time.

3. I recognized a failing strategy long before shit actually hit the fan. Or put another way I recognized when I first saw the situation I was in, lee sin a level ahead of me about to engage me in jungle as lulu goes afk from bot that my normal cookie cut strategy I had been sticking to was not going to work like it normally did. As a non-jungle main and someone who knows that something makes lee sin strong earlygame, and that lulu is an asshole in general, I knew to flee from the situation and if nothing else waste as much of their time as possible like the pro players say to do.

4. Again like the pro players I've watched I knew not to lose my cool over dying, instead I took into account how much time and resource was put into killing me and where that advantage would have gone to my team exactly. In this case the enemy jungler was visible and the bot lane support was mia for a bit.

5. I saw where a bronzie made an inevitable error, I know where the next one will probably make his and what bad habit my friend has now. I also learned something about common ally traits when under a different type of pressure.

The inability to learn from mismatched games is not a human weakness, that is your own personal weakness, do not assert that no other can do what you cannot. You yourself probably can if you stop crying sweet salty QQ tears.

Things like lee sin, regardless of balance very rarely will be allowed to go too far without nerfs or buffs. More than likely you just need to reconsider your strategy against such things. You'll find later that things that weren't popular or particularly strong in this meta will show up in a future meta and be strong despite the thing that still made them less impressive still being in the game except that nobody utilized it anymore for some reason.

The shyv setup I alluded to is actually something once used in a meta where there was a lot of invading and unwanted duels you had to be prepared for. We now have an additional item to help as well

TL;DR

Whine less, adapt more. I had a great time in an imbalanced match against a champ a lot of people are whining about constantly and even got an edge against him until I failed to anticipate something from my own team