Learn to Yomi
This essay is listed in my "Master List of Essay Threads" under the title "On Yomi"
Yomi: a players ability to anticipate what their opponent(s) will do in a given situation, and manipulate the situation to their advantage using that knowledge.
This is a skill that will take you far no matter what game you're playing (other than slots or something I guess). It's a very simple concept, but it sets players significantly apart in ways that mere mechanical ability cant. A bronze player may be able to pull off challenger level riven/zed/lee/yasuo/leblanc/etc. combos, but the reason they will almost always lose to an actual player of that level is because of the difference in yomi.
A player with stronger yomi than their opponent will land and avoid more skillshots, receive better ganks and escape more ganks, win more all ins and get cheesed less often, and just in general always seem to be in the right place at the right time - or at least more often then their enemies.
Too many players seem to put all their stock of 'skill' into practicing flashy moves and fancy tricks to get an edge on their opponent - but these tricks almost always fail if the enemy has a gold advantage or is at least similarly mechanically skilled. Once you hit a plateu for your mechanical level, you suddenly stop getting better and wonder why, but the answer is that you need to improve your yomi.
What good does it do to be able to 'make sick outplays' on your opponent if he's always harassing you down because he's hitting you more often than you hit him so you can never afford to go in, or if you're so easy to read that you get lured into ganks or walk into ambushes all day?
The next time you go into lane against someone, make sure to think about what they are going to be trying to do and how you can take advantage of that. Make a mental note of their lazy baits and patterns. If they seem to always rotate around minions in a mirror to you, try using that to make them walk into a bush where a jungler is waiting. If they seem to have a specific method of trading with you, try to fuck with it by doing something different that causes them to mess up and then switch back and forth so they have to keep guessing right if they want to trade efficiently. If that enemy fiora seems to lust after your vitals, try using that to purposefuly make her dive at you and back up so that she misses and it goes on cooldown.
League is filled with interactions that make mindgames worthwhile. Everything isn't just about hitting your buttons faster than the other guy.
From Sirlin:
Yomi
In competitive games, there is little more valuable than knowing the mind of the opponent, which the Japanese call “yomi.” All the complicated decisions in game theory go away if you know exactly what the opponent will do next. Sun Tzu says that reading minds is for the spirit world, and on that I cannot comment, but I have witnessed firsthand the ability of some players to “achieve things beyond the reach of ordinary men” through eerily powerful yomi. Perhaps these players are simply adept at “studying the details of the enemy,” but it seems to go far beyond that in some. There is one player who I would even say has a supernatural ability to spy on the minds of others, knowing which moves they will next make—if it weren’t such an absurd thing to say. But believe me, those who have witnessed Japan’s fighting game player Daigo Umehara do speak of these things in hushed tones, fancying that they might be true.
As a side note, I would even argue that the “strategic depth” of a game should be defined almost entirely on its ability to support and reward yomi. For a silly example, consider tic-tac-toe. There are only nine opening moves, and only three of them are functionally different. Even if through some witchcraft you know the move the opponent will make next, it doesn’t really matter. The game is so constrained that the opponent is forced to make certain moves, so the novice player along with the master of divination will be on basically the same footing. There is no room to develop “tendencies” or a certain “personality” or style of play in tic-tac-toe. There is only a simple algorithm at work and no room for yomi at all.
Yomi Layers
Any decent competitive game needs to allow you to counter the opponent if you know what he will do. What happens, though, when your enemy knows that you know what he will do? He needs a way to counter you. He’s said to be on another level than you, or another “yomi layer.” You knew what he would do (yomi), but he knew that you knew (yomi layer 2). What happens when you know that he knows that you know what he will do (yomi layer 3)? You’ll need a way to counter his counter. And what happens when he knows that you know . . .
I’ll nip that in the bud: there need only be support up to yomi layer 3, as yomi layer 4 loops back around to layer 0. Let’s say I have a move (we’ll call it “m”) that’s really, really good. I want to do it all the time. (Here’s where the inequality of risk/reward comes in. If all my moves are equally good, this whole thing falls apart.) The “level 0” case here is discovering how good that move is and doing it all the time. Then, you will catch on and know that I’m likely to do that move a lot (yomi layer 1), so you’ll need a counter move (we’ll call it “c1”). You’ve stopped me from doing m. You’ve shut me down. I need a way to stop you from doing c1. I need a counter to your counter, or “c2.”
Now you don’t know what to expect from me anymore. I might do m or I might do c2. Interestingly, I probably want to do m, but I just do c2 to scare you into not doing c1 anymore. Then I can sneak in more m.
You don’t have adequate choices yet. I can alternate between m and c2, but all you have is c1. You need a counter to c2, which we’ll call c3. Now we each have two moves.
Me: m, c2 You: c1, c3.
Now I need a counter to c3. The tendency for game designers might be to create a c4 move, but it’s not necessary. The move m can serve as my c4. Basically, if you expect me to do my counter to your counter (rather than my original good move m), then I don’t need a counter for that; I can just do go ahead and do the original move—if the game is designed that way. Basically, supporting moves up to yomi layer 3 is the minimum set of counters needed to have a complete set of options, assuming yomi layer 4 wraps around back to layer 0.
