Who should pick last
Picking after your lane opponent lets you answer their champion. That’s only worth something if matchups move the game. This page measures how far a lane matchup moves the game in each role, beyond both champions’ strength.
In short
- Give the last pick to bot: its matchups move the game about 2.5 points, clear of luck.
- Top and mid look close behind (2.5 and 2.2 points), but the games can’t tell them apart from luck yet.
- Support and jungle show the least (1.6 and 0.0 points), and neither is clear of luck: if someone has to pick blind, it costs them least.
- Over the four lanes together, matchups clearly matter.
What picking last is worth: with three champions to choose from and the right counter, about 2.1 points of win chance in bot, and about as much again by not being countered yourself. Which champion counters which is still mostly out of reach: only the clearest lanes show on Real counters.
Some champions are surely easier to counter than others. With these games, no champion’s lanes swing clearly more than chance yet (Safe blind picks), so there’s no list of them to trust.
In ranked, the pick order comes from the lobby, and teammates can trade picks. Ask to swap so your bot laner picks after theirs, and let the roles with nothing to lose pick first.
Matchups by role
How it’s computed. Every game’s five lanes, from 50,990 ranked games, are split into two halves at random. In each half, a matchup’s result is its win rate beyond what both champions’ overall win rates predict. Luck doesn’t repeat from one half to the other, so how much the two halves agree is how much matchups truly differ. Matchups need 10+ games in each half; the numbers are averaged over 20 splits. The swing is how far a typical matchup moves the game (one standard deviation). The value of picking last assumes the best of three champions, which gains about 0.85 of a swing on a typical one. In bot, the matchup is the two marksmen; their supports are in support.