How do you freeze a lane?

Press R

Lane is now frozen.

SoloRenektonOnly (found on Youtube and Twitch) talks about this a lot, so I'm sure if you check out his videos or catch his streams you'll see him explain this concept in depth probably a lot better than I can.

First, lets use his terminology. There are things called even minion waves and uneven waves. As you would assume, even minion waves means that there is the same number of minions on both the ally and enemy waves. Uneven, as you would assume, means there is one or more minions on either the ally minion wave or the enemy minion wave. If it is uneven in blues favor, that means there are more blue minions than red minions.

Even minion rule means that an even wave on one side of the map will always push, regardless of what that sides' champions do. Split the map down river, if the minion waves crash on blue side of the river, the wave will push towards red side regardless of what the blue side champions do and vice versa.

Uneven minion waves will most of the time push. This is due to one side having more minions, thus being able to kill off the other minions faster. If there are a few (1-4) extra blue minions on blues side of the map, the wave will push to red. If there are a few (1-4) extra blue minions on reds side of the map or near the middle of the lane, the wave can freeze or push into red.

Reinforcement wave is the newly spawning wave of minions. That wave will eventually get to where the two waves crash and reinforce the minions currently fighting, hence the name.

Let's put this in context

Say an even minion wave crashes on your side of the map.

The even minion rule states that an even wave on your side of the map will always push regardless of what you do to the wave. The only thing you can control is whether it pushes slowly (by you not attacking the enemy minions) or fast (by you helping to kill the enemy minions). The reason it will always push regardless of what you do is because of the reinforcement waves. Since the current crashed wave is closer to your tower (and thus your base), your reinforcement wave takes less time to reach the fight then the enemy wave does, so the minion wave becomes uneven and thus pushes because your minions kill off the enemy minions faster.

What it takes to freeze a wave.

To properly set up a freeze, you need an uneven minion wave with 4ish more enemy minions than ally minions. The reason for this is because you want to freeze the wave near your tower, meaning your reinforcement wave will reach the current crashed wave faster than the enemies reinforcement wave does because your wave has less distance to travel. In order to maintain the freeze when the reinforcement wave arrives, the enemy minions have to be killing off your wave faster than your wave can kill off the enemy minions. If they do not kill off your wave faster, then your wave will eventually become bigger and push.

Freezing the wave

Since you need a larger enemy wave than your current wave, you first need to identify what is currently happening to the wave. More often than not, you will be bouncing a wave off a tower and need to manipulate new wave so it pushes to you.

The easiest way is to create an even minion wave on the enemies side of the river. Due to the even minion rule, it will push to you regardless of what the enemy does. This can be accomplished by simply stalling the enemy minion wave by walking forward and getting the minions aggro and letting them focus on you until your wave gets to the enemies side. This also means you can do this while the enemy champion is or is not in lane.

Another way is by only last hitting while the enemy champion pushes the wave. Obviously this only works if the enemy champion is in lane and pushing. If they are last hitting, then you'd have to wait for the minion autos to be in the air and then last hit, thus denying those attacks from being directed at the new minion and thus raising the chance the lane will push. This is unlikely and you risk losing CS if you don't know the timing well and/or are melee.

Another way is by getting the enemy champion to attack you, thus your minions will aggro them and his minions will continue to kill your minions. Obviously, this is much more difficult unless you have a taunt ability, and thus not as reliable as the previous methods.

Once the lane starts pushing towards you, either by itself or by you manipulating it, then you need to work on maintaining the wave. If there are too many enemy minions, it may push too hard so you need to trim excess enemy minions to prevent them from killing your minions too quickly otherwise they will get under the tower and break your freeze. To freeze the wave outside your tower, you need 4 extra minions so you can trim any extra minions.

Once your wave is frozen, you need to make sure your freeze doesn't break. If the enemy minions wander under your tower and you lose any of your +4 minions, you will lose your freeze. This may require you pulling the enemy wave back. You can do this by getting minion aggro, the walking towards on of the bushes in your lane. The minions will follow you until they lose sight of you in the bush, then they will continue walking along the lane. By moving in and out of the bush, you can stall the wave there to help maintain your freeze if necessary.

When to break your freeze

Setting up a freeze is much easier if you are ahead, cause then you can more easily control when minions die. Freezing allows you to deny CS and Exp from the enemy, so this is one way to increase you lead without needing to kill your laner.

However, your enemies choice is to either try to break your freeze, or to roam and get stuff elsewhere since your team will always be down a teammate if you want to maintain that freeze. If they roam, this is when you need to break your freeze so you can help your team and punish them for leaving lane by pushing the minion wave into their tower.

Preconditions of freeze : the opponent wave contains more minions than yours What you gotta do : only lasthit, don't let it reach tower. If there's only you and you got no minions, you can drag them backwards or go in and out a bush to take/cancel aggro

If you want to learn tricks like freezing and zoning, I recommend watching Phylol. https://www.youtube.com/user/ThePhylol

Short Version of Freezing: Not pushing but not being pushed by the enemy, controlling the minion wave in a specific spot.

Freezing made easy= save a caster minion from a wave, let it aggro you, pull it to where you want the wave to be and wait for your wave to catch up.