How To Counter A Split Pusher In League

Introduction

We will discuss on everything you need to know about How To Counter A Split Pusher In League.

Table of Contents

Did you know that simply countering a split pushers strategy will win you the game?

Today we are going to cover the following:

How to deal with split pushing
How to stop split pushing
How to handle split pushers
How to stop specific split pushing champions

One of the best ways to get an easy win in lol is to counter your enemies strategies. Not only does this work but it can also forgive your bad play and negligence. It also doesn’t require you to be a mechanical god and win all the 1v1 fights. It doesn’t even require you to be good at team fights. It’s very important to understand that once you neutralize one of the enemy teams strategy you basically turn the game into a 4v5.

Besides the part that stopping them can have a tilt like effect (wrote an article which you can find below). It can also exhibit you understanding deeper how the game works at a macro level and encourage your team to follow your lead.

Having said that never underestimate split pushing it’s one of the most effective strategies in league of legends since inception. If a split pusher gets out of hand then it will be very hard to counter or stop them. Read on to understand better how to deal with split pushing in general and how to stop a split pusher.

How Do You Deal With Split Pushing

The biggest challenge on dealing with a split pusher is basically when the split pushing gets out of hand. So the first and outmost important thing to do is to try and detect split pushing early. How do you detect/identify split pushing early you may ask?

Well lets go over a list of some ways I think are useful to detect split pushing early.

Champion: There’s a certain pool of champions that fall into the split pushing field. I have written an extensive article which you can find linked at the end of this article if you would like to start knowing who it is. For example if you see a tryndamere or a Nasus you should be almost certain that they will never leave their lane and split push forever.
Champion Lane: Typically split pushers are part of the top lane. This limits the amount of champions that can split push to 20% making it a lot easier to identify. Also it’s almost always a top laner unless you are against a Tristana or weird mid laner such as Malzahar that has gobblings to help him push.
Levels: Since the split pusher will typically be solo most of the game his experience will be massively higher than everyone else (unless someone else is fed in the game). So if the champion is a top laner and is 1-2 levels above you it’s very likely he’s split pushing.
Farm: Along with levels and experience also comes the farm. Since you are split pushing you are getting a lot of creeps and your creep score will usually be higher than everyone else because you are not wasting time roaming or participating in team fights.
Map: Make sure you are paying attention to the map at all times. If you peak and you see the top laner alone there not participating in the team fights you can probably assume his strategy is to split push.

As you can see from the list above we can take a simple scenario. If the enemy top laner is Yorick and he has higher farm and levels than everyone else without even observing in the map you can know that he has been split pushing the entire game. There’s some cases where you can have a false positive case of a split pusher and this is typically when an enemy champion is basically behind or losing lane they may temporarily split push to get some experience and gold from farming so they can get back into the game.

How To Stop Split Pushing

Now that we went over on how to deal with split pushers which is really how you identify their behavior we can talk about a few ways on how to stop them. It’s very important before anything to fully identify the situation.

Since you have identified it lets go over on how to stop it.

Rotate to stop him typically 2 people is fine, when there’s no objective in the map.
Try to counter split push and antagonize his split pushing, this strategy is particularly effective if you are also playing a good duelist champion.
Get baron, the baron buff typically works wonders on split pushing and stopping split pushing.
Break an enemy inhibitor, once you do this the super minions will make the split pushers job a lot slower. The reason is that his clear will be much harder and may get stalled to the point that he’s not effective, furthermore if the superminions are pushing in a different lane than him they can actually make advances in his base and even reach the home nexus towers.
Duel him, if you are ahead or if you feel confident that you can win the 1v1 or get him low enough where he has to stop or abandon his mission. Note you should never do this if there’s an objective in the map that’s important. A good example of this would be Dragon soul, elder dragon, baron (late game) or even herald.
Control your waves. If you keep your waves handled and none of your lanes are pushing in you’d have enough reactionary time to kill the split pusher.

How To Handle Split Pushers

We went over in the previous sections how to identify and stop split pushers but we haven’t gone over how to handle them with your team. The key to handling split pushers is basically communication with your team members.

It’s vital you use the methods we described earlier and the characteristics of a split pusher to identify them first. Once this is done you will want to bring it up as early as possible to your team members. A simple chat communication is sufficient but you will also need to do periodic reminders to them during the game so they will not forget. Since League of Legends is a fast paced game and things are always moving fast people tend to forget so a reminder is a good approach.

Just don’t overdo it because it may have the opposite effect of what you want. Some people may react in a negative way once this gets annoying. Another thing you can do is to start using smart pings. In fact those that use smart pings have a much higher chance of winning the game effectively as they get the point across without too much talking.

One thing I like to do is ping the tower the split pusher is moving towards too. So let’s say if I see him pushing on a side lane like top when I see the pattern or if I see the minion wave following him growing in size then I will immediately ping the first tower that he’s about to start targeting.

This gives time to my team to react and be able to start doing something about it such as rotating or using one of the many methods we went over earlier in the how to stop a split pusher in league of legends.

How To Stop Yorick Split Pushing

Now that we have covered the basics of how to identify, stop and handle a split pusher we will go over some details on how to stop specific champions that are good on split pushing. Off course I’m going to start with a very peculiar split pusher in the sense that he has a different and unique way of doing so that’s actually built into his champion kit.

Yorick’s ultimate spawns a monster that helps him split push and even does the job for him without having to do anything. If you combine that monster along with Herald or a baron buff this makes his split pushing very difficult to stop as now you have to deal with two different things. In order to stop Yorick’s split pushing you have to basically stop his ultimate.

The good thing is that Yorick’s ultimate is visible and you can be reactive towards it. If you disrespect it and do not spend the time to take it out it may cause irreversible damage to your towers. Generally speaking the easiest approach here is to just be fast and kill it when it spawns. If there’s an objective in the map or if your team is on the other side of the map fighting the enemies then you will be faced with a hard decision.

The answer comes down to which tower he’s about to take out. If it’s a tier-1 tower then it’s ok to sacrifice it. If it’s a tier-2 or base tower then you need to be more pro-active and stop his effort. It is simply difficult dealing with this but it will pay out later in the game and be helpful for you to terminate his ultimate.

How To Stop Sion Split Pushing

Sion’s split pushing got popular when a famous streamer Baus started abusing this method in late Season 12. He was notorious for going into different regions and abusing the strategy also known as feed to win sion. Basically what he does is he focuses on towers and uses his ultimate to escape whenever he can. Since the damage in the towers is irreversible for the enemy team the hit is massive.

On the other hand once he reaches a certain amount of deaths his gold value is very low so the impact to his team is not as big as you may think. Yes he’s giving kills to the enemies but he accomplishes a bigger greater goal which is getting closer into the nexus. As you can tell the strategy is particularly useful especially in higher elos where your team can identify it and adapt to it.

In lower elos where the players do not have the discipline or game knowledge they may get tilted and lose the game anyway. In either case identify it early and respond to it. Luckily since there isn’t a great lot of counter play to it, Riot did nerf it and made it impossible to do. Now he switched to a Volibear strategy but for that we will have to wait and see how efficient it is before we start talking about it.

How To Stop Fiora/Jax/Tryndamere Split Pushing

Finally you have the range of champions such as Fiora, Jax and Tryndamere which all follow the same style of split pushing. This style I would say is the traditional style of split pushing where you have a duelist with a lot of mobility that focuses entirely on taking out your side lanes. All these three champions are very efficient in this play style and can split push well.

We have gone over earlier in the how to stop the split pusher in league of legends and the general strategies for those work well with one small exception. Since those three champions are all very good duelists and their kit was designed for that you will need a bit more man power to stop them. So keep this in mind when you rotate to try and take them out.

A good example of this would a fed Katarina going to try and stop them she will have a hard time doing so even if she’s levels and kills ahead as they will simply outduel her. My point is that you need to be very careful as this may cost your team time and gold income if you fail to do so while letting the split pusher continue his job. Use smart pings and communication as we discussed earlier to better handle the situation.

Conclusion

If you found How To Counter A Split Pusher In League useful and you think it may have helped you please drop me a cheer below I would appreciate it.

If you have any questions, comments please post them below I check periodically and try to answer them in the priority they come in.
Also if you have any corrections please do let me know and I’ll update the article with new updates or mistakes I did.

What’s your favorite champion to stop split pushers?

As mentioned earlier mine is jax. Jax has a good amount of mobility and can duel most split pushers. Him being a split pusher himself is a big advantage but he can also participate very well in team fights. If a split pusher faces a Jax especially in late game they will surely back off and will be forced to re-evaluate if they want to keep split pushing. Be very careful at the beginning and make sure you encourage your team at all times to help you stop them.

If you want to avoid this from happening to you I have written some similar articles which you can find below.

If you would like to find more information on the champions I discussed above you can go here: