Losing without losing it: How SK are learning from rough LEC start

We caught up with SK Gaming coach Simon “Swiffer” Papamarkos to discuss how to learn from losses, and how the LEC roster is staying resilient despite their 2-7 record.

It’s an unfortunate fact of competition that in any tournament, someone has to lose. We hear stories of undefeated miracle runs, of championship victories, of perfect games and incredible outplays.

But much less often do we hear stories of the blood, sweat, and tears put into turning around a run of poor performances. Of the emotionally fraught VOD reviews, the frank and sometimes uncomfortable discussions that have to be held in order to improve a struggling team.

This is the uncomfortable spot in which SK Gaming finds itself. The team sits at a 2-7 record after Week 4, ninth in the LEC, their playoff hopes vanishing fast. They’ve shown some signs of life in their games, even taking a win off the MAD Lions in Week 1, but they’ve also looked incredibly lost on the map, and lacked initiative in crucial moments.

But coach Swiffer explains that the team is remaining positive, and that, despite their record, they don’t feel that they’re “stuck in a hole” of repetitive losses with no actionable takeaways.

“It can suck to feel like you’re losing to different things every single time, but that also means that you’re not stuck in a hole of making the same mistakes over and over again,” he told Dexerto. “Keeping that perspective is critical to maintaining a level of progression, even if you’re losing.”

League of Legends is a game with a million moving parts, and a million infinitesimal moments where a game can be lost or won with a single mistimed press of a button. Finding tangible, actionable moments of improvement can be a herculean task for coaches and players alike.

Swiffer explained that often, simplifying the game to its most basic components is the best recipe for meaningful improvement. His coaching philosophy is that “breaking it down, making it tangible, and giving players small, actionable goals to work on” is one of the key methods to avoiding conflict in team environments.

“If I come in and just say, ‘Why didn’t we do this better?’, and leave it to the players to figure it out with no guidance, I think that’s when people can start feeling lost,” he said. “If you start breaking it down and giving people these tangible goals, I feel like you’re a lot less likely to lose yourself as a team.”

Transitioning from coach to pro

League is a game that will never truly be ‘solved’, which means that five players can have five completely different ideas on how to correctly play out a scenario in-game. There is rarely a ‘correct’ answer when it comes to League, and decisions often have to be made in a split-second in competitive games.

This is something Swiffer understands all too well, given his background as a professional player who competed as a mid laner on multiple teams in the Oceanic Pro League. He sees his former professional experience as “one of [his] greatest strengths” as a coach, and explained that his past experience on the competitive stage helps him better empathize with the decision-making process of his players.

“As a player, if I made a sequence of plays, they always made sense to me when I was doing them,” he admitted. “But usually, when those plays were incorrect, it was because I’d lost sight of my role in that game and of what my overall objective as a part of the team should have been. And so I deviated in a way that would have made no sense to an observer, but that made sense to me.”

A player’s perspective on a game will be vastly different from that of a coach. While a coach is given an omniscient view through the luxury of spectating, a player can only truly see from their own perspective, and momentary “lapses in concentration” are, according to Swiffer, an unfortunately unavoidable part of pro play.

And that’s where Swiffer’s philosophy of simplification comes in for the SK roster. In those lapses of concentration, he wants each player to have a simple role they can fall back on.

“It sucks that you have to revoke some creative license,” he explained, “but it’s a necessary step to get everyone on the same page, and when we’re down 2-7 we can’t afford to take risky creative plays.”

Remaining hopeful

Despite their win record, SK are still confident they’re making progress, even if Swiffer isn’t entirely happy with the pace at which that progress is being made.

“I think it would be somewhat remiss to say that I’m happy with our improvement, because I don’t think the results generally reflect that,” he said. “I’d like to think I’m not as results-based as maybe other people, but it would also be nice to have better results.”

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SK’s focus in the first few weeks of the LEC was on their early-game decision making, particularly around Rift Herald. Although their early game has come a long way since Week 1, there are still changes to be made.

Using their Week 4 loss against Misfits Gaming as an example, Swiffer explained how SK’s coaching staff has found teachable moments in losses.

“It was important for us to break down the map movements for the first Rift Herald and the team fighting for the second, because I think those two moments were definitely what snowballed the game out of control” he explained.

Moving forward, the team’s focus for the week would then be on making sure players were “aligned” on how to execute those scenarios in the future. This alignment is a key factor. With SK’s record in its current state, they’ll find much more success in executing simple strategies as a team, rather than looking to risk it all on flashy plays with no guarantee of success.

Each week allows the team to hone this basic strategy, and once the wins start coming in, the creative flair can slowly be brought back.

Of course, they’d like to not have quite so many losses to learn from. But Swiffer explained that, while the goal for the team is still a playoff spot, they want to get there the “right” way.

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“There are specific things that we do in the game that we don’t do consistently well enough to make playoffs,” he admitted. “I think we will make the playoffs if we do these things correctly in the game, but right now we don’t. So the goal is to make playoffs, but to do it in a way where we progress as a team.”

Generally, the cutoff for playoffs in the LEC is nine wins. Currently, SK would have to win all but two of their games in the second round robin to be in with a chance of a playoff spot. Their chances are getting slimmer and slimmer with every passing week, but Swiffer reaffirms that the playoffs are still very much a “future prospect”.