This LoL pro emotes to help win games, here’s how

Apr 17, 2023

Reading time: 2 min

League of Legends is a mechanically complex game, but one LoL pro took it to the next level by using emotes to detect if enemies can see him.

League of Legends has all sorts of ways to optimize gameplay and find clever strategies to beat your opponents. Most of these are about in-game techniques, but a new way to figure out critical information was revealed by a Chinese pro player. Emotes don’t have any in-game effect on their own, but Mao “Aki” An, the current jungler for Oh My God, has found a clever new way to use them. In his game against Top Esports, Aki was using emotes to figure out if a specific enemy player could see him.

LoL pro emotes to bait enemies into revealing info

Recently, in a match against Top Esports, Oh My God jungler Aki kept using emotes while in the presence of Huang “Wayward” Ren-Xing. This may seem like harmless fun between two competitors on the game’s biggest stage, but Aki says he was actually using the emotes to get information out of the enemy player. Aki was using emotes while potentially in Fog of War and gauging whether or not he was standing on a Stealth Ward by judging Wayward’s response. Known for being an emote-lover himself, Aki knew that Wayward would likely emote in return.

During todays stream, Aki confirmed that the reason why he kept emoting before gank during the game against TES is to see if Wayward emotes back at him. If Wayward emotes back, then there is vision in the bush… pic.twitter.com/qmqPpKbj3P
— LoL Context-Chan (@LoLContextChan) April 11, 2023

It’s cheeky, and definitely unorthodox, but it’s a clever way to play off of your opponent’s tendencies. Aki confirmed that the reason he was emoting so much was to see if the opponent emoted back on a live stream after Oh My God’s game against Top Esports. It wouldn’t work if his opponent had the restraint to not emote in return, but Aki clearly thinks that Wayward emotes as a knee-jerk reaction rather than fully considering what information can be drawn from it.

It probably won’t crack open your solo queue climb, but it’s a fun piece of tech to keep in mind.