High elo players cannot carry 3 feeding players, so we make sure our teammates don't feed

So one of the most common complaints I see on this board is that, "I can't carry 3-4 feeders. Not even Faker can." And you're right. When Faker has 3 teammates that feed relentlessly, and the enemy team is rallied and organized, the games are almost impossible to win.

Which is why many high elo players' movements are centered around preventing their teammates from feeding. How? Through a concept called pressuring.

What is pressuring?

Pressuring is, quite simply, the act of threatening to punish someone for making a specific move. You notice how when you're calmly trying to cs in lane and Zed just sits right behind the melees and dares you to do anything? That's pressure.

How is this different from punishing?

To the untrained player, there is no difference. To a smart player, it's a matter of restricting movements. If you have a minion disadvantage and you know that the enemy wants to trade into you because of how they're walking up, you'll walk back and wait for the next wave to arrive. You have been pressured. If your lanes are pushing up, you as a jungler can go for aggressive invades because your team should arrive sooner. You are pressuring. If the enemy takes the bait, you can punish them.

It's like the Zed matchup I listed above. If he sits in front of the wave and scares you off 2 creeps, you've been pressured. If you walk up and cs the minions without trading into him, you've been punished. If you get an even trade, you've both been punished evenly, but you haven't forced him to stay back yet so you're still the only one getting pressured.

Why is this important?

Because I see a lot of games where someone is 25/10/5 and they still lose the game since they don't know how to snowball their lead or take advantage of how fed they are. Being 3/0 and knowing where to be and how to break the enemy's rhythm is far more important than being 8/0 and only showing up for cleanup duty instead of making plays.

Okay so how do I exert pressure?

As a laner you have a number of options. -The easiest is to push your lane. By pushing waves, you threaten to get them eaten up by the tower. Now your lane opponent has to stay in lane with a minion disadvantage and can't attend to anything going on around him. I hate when junglers post here venting, "just play safe and let me carry" because by pushing and being aggressive, you're stopping your opponent from playing the map. -Poke down your opponent. When you have minion advantages, you can poke your opponent for free (they won't be able to trade without pulling minion aggro or getting wave forced into tower & missing cs). This forces them to back off and maybe recall. They exert no zone of pressure at this time and force their jungler to intervene to help. -Crash a big wave. Crashing big waves gets large amounts of cs to hit the tower. The enemy now has to focus this wave and that leaves you open to do a number of things including roaming and diving. -Go off the map. Where is the Katarina? We don't know. If we're not careful she dives us so let's play back. -Freeze waves. I know I said pushing is the easiest so this would seem counterintuitive, but if you can force your opponent off a large number of creeps or all in them when they walk up (or get the jungler to help you if you've got good setup CC), you're going to generate a lot of pressure and that can lead to them missing cs, forcing the jungler to their lane just to break said freeze, or you can roam and pick up free kills.

As a jungler, keep in mind that you have more options, which is why the role is considered busted in high elo. -Invade. If your lanes are aggressive and can play up, you can use that to harass the opposing jungler and take his camps to set him behind. -Gank. Obvious one. if you force their sums or kill them they suddenly have to play a lot more passively. -Play a side. If the enemy knows you're on a specific side and you win that 2v2/3v3, you relieve a huge amount of pressure from your laner since your opponent will play farther back. If they don't, you kill them and they're scared of that. -Of course, staying off the map for junglers works the same as it does for laners, you just give off a continual, weaker aura of pressure rather than this spike of, "oh shit the midlaner is roaming." -Taking neutral objectives. This might sound like a punish or play rather than pressure, but do you know how far back you force the enemy by getting baron? Rift means you can drag 2-3 people to the lane of your choice while you work on something elsewhere. Just getting neutrals can demoralize your enemy (you have 2 infernals on a 5/1 Trist, how many people will wanna play out that game?), and cause them to play completely differently.

What are metrics to know you succeeded in pressuring an opponent?

I'm glad you asked. Pressure can be hard to gauge since it's not a metric of what you do but what the enemy hasn't done or can't do.

Overall, it looks like -Valuable spells (summoners) expended -Gold/exp denied -Time the enemy has spent off the map (the less time off the map, the better) -How frequently you break enemy tempo (does the jungler gank constantly without success?) -Whether your opponent can fulfill their role in fights (i.e. zoning an AD/supp from fights so they cannot hit valuable targets)

So to tie into the clickbait title, when pressure is applied properly it prevents the opponent from rotating to get leads and take objectives. These high elo players, by aggressively positioning themselves, discourage their opponent from using anyone in other lanes or roles to snowball and run over a game. Dopa is a phenomenal example because his signature pick is TF. Just by playing TF, before bot lane even hits level 5 they have to start positioning a lot more safely because they know if they push up Dopa will use his ultimate and snowball the game off those two kills. It doesn't even matter if their bot lane is something like that wants to snowball like Lucian/Blitzcrank. They now have to respect the fact they'll lose 2v3s and will not play nearly as forward as they could into any other midlane matchup.

TL;DR at the end of the day, the scoreboard does not matter, the amount of pressure you can exert does. While it is the hardest to measure, master, and apply to your gameplay, pressure exerted is the greatest predictor of the winning team.