PSA to Silver Midlaners: CSing

The last month of ranked is about to begin, and for those of you mid-silvers who think you can do it, here is some advice I followed to get to gold. It wasn't about warding or thinking or any of that, and believe me I read all of those things. My disclaimer is that I am only showing Fizz ranked games in the link, and it would have been impossible to win 12 Fizz ranked games in a row without a combination of luck, the server move giving me 30 ping, and fairly good teams for most of those games. With that said, I'll quote Dunkmaster : "My scores speak for themselves*." Including the abhorrent CS. So here is my advice for the final climb:

CSing is really not THAT important. Granted, if you want to do well you should learn to cs well and miss relatively few minions. People watch the pros with their ridiculous and unrealistic 10 cs/minute scores and think that is what is important to doing well, and it is true that as elo increases so does average cs. But let's compare two scenarios for a common mid laner, say , who is currently the most played mage.

Player 1 focuses on getting all the cs she can, misses one or two minions per wave and ends up with 80 cs at 10 minutes and a score of 1/0/1 because she is playing safe and getting farm, and maybe also went all-in for a kill at 6 and helped the jungler out once. Player 1 gets 90 gold per minute naturally, plus 1600 gold (3-4 kills worth) from cs and another 400 gold from the 1/0/1 score. Not bad at all. That's around 300 gold per minute.

Player 2 knows how to cs, but goes ham and tries to get as much aggression and pushing off as possible to make room for ganks. Player two ends up with a whopping 40 cs at 10 minutes, and has a score of 3/2/2 from a few ganks off on botlane. He got 90 gold per minute naturally as well, plus 700 gold (2-3 kills worth) from cs and another 1000 gold from the 3/2/2 score.

So player 2 is behind by 300 gold, which is really one kill, and fed the enemy team 2 kills from going too aggressive in ganks or in lane trades. But player 2 also applied pressure around the map, getting far more kill participation and possibly helping her team do dragon or take a tower botlane. Personally, I would rather have player 2 on my team every time.

Important to mention here is that being able to CS competently is very important. If you are playing , for example, you can roam and push and still get good cs. In this case, you should get good cs. The point of this post is that if you see someone had a game, like the majority of my match history, where someone got barely any cs (ex. 117 cs in a 28 minute game), do not write it off because they still won and if their kill participation was any good, they still helped there team. One other thing I feel should be mentioned is that I used 10 minutes as an example, you might not be able to roam 3 times by 10 minutes unless you are really focusing and the enemy botlane isn't warding so well (which, let's be honest, is realistic in silver).

*The 9/11/12 game was not because I did badly, but to commemorate the day the game was played on. Yeah, let's go with that.

TL;DR: Sitting in mid lane, farming, and having a good kda or gold per minute does not win games. Being willing to take risks and roam to help your team by applying pressure bot lane is what wins games. Don't call someone bad just because their cs is bad.