The jungle guides
How to track the enemy jungler
Tracking the enemy jungler is a running prediction, not a warding assignment. Three pieces of information place him on the map at any minute of the early game: his starting buff, the clear speed of his champion, and the camp count his creep score reveals. Update the prediction every time he shows, and use it to decide which half of the map is yours.
The concept
Players imagine tracking as vision. It's closer to bookkeeping. Every jungler starts somewhere and clears at a knowable speed; he leaves a paper trail in the Tab screen. If his CS says eight camps and he started top side red, there are only so many places he can be standing. The players who seem to have map awareness you can't explain are doing this arithmetic, most of them out loud at first.
The second half of the skill is what the books call reading absence. A mid laner who vanishes at five minutes is information; so is an enemy jungler who hasn't shown in forty seconds. You don't need to see a champion to know something about him. You just need to notice that you can't.
The read is held loosely. It's built from imperfect information, and it gets corrected the moment the map contradicts it. A tracker who refuses to update is just a confident guesser.
"The minimap tells you where people are and, just as importantly, where they are not."
The rules
- Note his start before the game begins.Leashes, level one positions, and the first camp he could reach tell you the origin of every route he can run.
- Read his CS every time you Tab.Camps are roughly predictable CS. His number tells you how much of his route is complete and where its end is.
- Say the prediction out loud.Red start, three camps by two minutes, bot Scuttle at 3:15. Naming it forces the read to be specific enough to be wrong, which is how it improves.
- Update on every sighting.One glimpse of him top side rewrites the next ninety seconds of your plan. The prediction is a draft, forever.
- Play the opposite side, and never die testing the read.A read pays off in position and safe aggression. If being right requires a coinflip, you have left the method.
The exceptions
- Some champions break the arithmetic on purpose. Junglers with unusual clears, lane ganks, or camp skips inject noise into the CS math. Against them, weight sightings and pings more heavily than the model, and widen your margin of safety.
- Late game, tracking dissolves into vision control. Once camps stop defining movement, the discipline shifts from predicting a route to controlling the river and pit entrances before objectives. The habit of asking where is he survives; the arithmetic retires.
Common mistakes
- Tracking only after dying. The gank you never saw was written in his pathing two minutes earlier; by the death screen the useful part of the read is already over.
- Warding instead of thinking. A ward shows one bush. The start-speed-CS model covers the whole jungle, and it works before your first ward hits the ground.
- Treating the read as certainty. Overcommitting to a prediction, even a correct one, is how trackers donate kills. Position first, confirmation second.
- Ignoring what your lanes see. Every enemy laner who backs, roams, or pings missing is feeding your model. Tracking is a team sport that only you are keeping score for.
The checklist
- Loading screen: what does their jungler want to do, gank early or farm?
- 1:30: watch leash positions. Which buff did he start?
- Every Tab: read his CS and add camps to his route.
- Every sighting: say where he goes next.
- Before you cross the river: does the read say this side is safe, and did you ward the way back?
What this looks like at high elo
The Perceptive Jungler builds its first read on exactly this loop, and its sharpest line is about what you can't see. The enemy mid disappears from the minimap at five minutes, and nobody has died yet. Low elo waits to learn why. High elo treats the absence itself as the report: someone is moving, a play is forming, and the safe half of the map just changed. Absence is a read.
Watch this system in a live Challenger game
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In this video: Live high Challenger commentary on the blind read: knowing where the enemy jungler is when you can't see them. It covers building a running picture from clear speeds, skipped camps and absences on the minimap, then using that read to decide when to contest, when to play the opposite side of the map, and when a fight is winnable in the moment.
Prefer text? Read this lesson as an article
Welcome back to another game sense development video. We're going to be kind of discussing a couple of topics in this video. Again, it's going to be in live high challenger commentary, so you do recognize a couple of names here and then we are going to be kind of playing the best we can. As always, you can skip match stats starting here shortly, so look away if you wanted to skip those match stat results. If you don't really mind, then of course you can just keep on looking.
But yeah, today of course like, comment, subscribe. We are growing pretty quickly, so that is always nice to see. Going to keep on trying my best to write more free ebooks for you guys, so just PDFs on all the knowledge in League of Legends. Might even go to other lanes soon, but we'll see. That will be a massive task.
But yeah, anyway, you can come back now if you skip match results and let's get right into today's topic. We're going to be talking about game sense development in the sense of going in blind. So this isn't the same as kind of making a 60/40 play on like a dragon fight and then you're like, yeah, I can probably win, but like you're not sure. It's not the same at all. This is going to be where you're not sure what's where the enemies even are, but you have a hunch that they're going to be somewhere else, right?
So this game we see that Zyra is first time we know he is just struggling normally, so I think he will be kind of faster than me. This is sort of where you can develop your own plays. This is something I've done myself, the full clear Rek'Sai and then I just kind of refined my game. I think I was probably I've not seen anybody else do this, so we're going to have to go up top, right? Because essentially Zyra is too fast here, so we're essentially going to skip this play, go all the way top, and then have to ping here.
I don't know why he's muted, but okay, he is. Yeah, we are going to kind of just pick this one, right? So, this is something I've developed over just these three Rek'Sai tunnels, and then you kind of just make your own play. This is something you might have to do. And then I'm going to just kind of invade into here.
Maybe I can. This should work out for us, right? He's already here. Camille is here. We're just going to ping, and then we're going to be out.
He was forced to use smite here. >> He's not there. I'm going to go back down. I want to lose out on some tempo here cuz I would double as faster. But, his top camp he skipped.
So, this is actually fine, right? He gets to just His sequence sucks now because he skipped top. But yeah, we had a feeling that Zyra is going to be in the area. I guessed that he is going to be at his camp, but instead he went for a gank. It didn't work out for him, of course, but it is okay.
I'm going to just ping that he's probably there. Go down here, not show on any vision. Oh, what the hell is this? I died. Oh, wait, right?
I think it's fine. We ping. We play this. Back off this guy. Yeah, there we go.
This guy should be He should be banned for what he did. He's over tempoing against Rek'Sai. Okay. I mean, it's fine. I think there's no chance he wins this cuz we're outnumbering them anywhere.
Interesting. Interesting play. He only did this because we like we ruined him top. So, he has to do this. This is my only play right now.
Yeah, but a lot of the time in jungle, right? Like you can't really see them. So, you're going to have to make the blind read. We're able to just kind of I feel like essentially it's super difficult cuz you can't actually see them all the time. You have to be tracking them via your game sense.
And the only way to really develop this is to just kind of constantly update your information to like where it would make sense. And I think you overstated that. Like he thought he could push out the wave, but he couldn't get it. It's Zyra. I'm okay with just giving up red.
Yeah, I'm okay with just giving that. I don't really care too much. Go here. Cuz he didn't get my red, right? Or did he?
I'm just going to play this side. and go cuz we have pushing top. Can't really go into Camille here. It's fine to just play away from it real quick and then just play on it next time. That's my best play.
Yeah, I don't really know. I'm just going to test it out. I think this is better, but Yeah, it's highly possible that this would not be better as well, right? So 100% sure on this. Just going to ping onto these three.
Okay, so we're pretty much just going to sequence our camps like this. Ended up making a decent amount of plays happen. We stole his camps. He couldn't really They play on ours. I don't want what we want to happen for us.
>> An enemy has been slain. >> Then couldn't really Lagging super hard. Lag. >> An ally has been slain. >> I'm lagging really hard right now.
I think it's the servers, maybe. I'm though. But yeah, we're going to just be sequencing our camps down here, and then we should be able to fight them here. Just waiting for it right now. He might be there, he might not be.
We honestly did not have vision of him, so I think he's going to Yeah, he's going to be around here. I think the servers are lagging a little bit, but that's fine. Yeah, it's pretty much just We sequence the camps down, and then already good enough for us, right? This is a good item for us, and then we're super strong. We can look to fight.
We are very, very strong. And we're making the little three-tunnel formation here. Just get back faster any which way we want, play out any situation. Here, we can take a look at top side real quick, but I'm not sure if it's genuinely necessary. I think I'm going to just kind of go down here and then He is going to win a little bit in terms of camps, cuz he's basically been, you know, stealing them with Camille, but honestly, he easily has top camps up here, so >> Nice.
They just don't have five. But they don't have like more people here, so we're just going to look to win. He really wants the dragon cuz he's really confused. He's like, "Wait, aren't we winning, guys?" Not really. You can see that Tristana is very very confused as to why his team didn't get the dragon there.
Instead, they fought us. Like they should have just worked his side, but instead, I think they got confused and we were able to take advantage of them. But yeah, that's why we go in. But also, like you're going to have to do the blind reads like that. We didn't quite 100% know that he's going to not be there in time.
So, but that is the situation. I'm lagging. I think it's a little bit of server lag. Yeah, we win our champs easier. >> [laughter] >> This is true.
>> [laughter] >> Our champions are easier to execute. It's so funny. Maybe this is like this is a sign. We don't have to have good mechanics anymore. And just push.
Just fight them here. Push it. >> I can't believe [laughter] I got it actually. He didn't do it fast enough. I'm stealing his camps real quick.
I don't have anything else. Ping him. This guy is here. Top side is their only play now. Yeah, you want to force the enemies on top side.
Like if they are forced to go top, it's already really rough for them honestly. I think it's fine. I'm going to ping back and go all camps now. Look at what Camille's doing, honestly. This is crazy.
Camille support, by the way, it's not a I mean, if you have, you know, kind of if you've been around, at least, you should you know, you probably know that Camille's a top laner, so whenever these weird support picks go other roles, they really have to be good at it. Otherwise, things can turn really rough really fast. He's a little bit on his little bit coming over there now. Yeah, as you can see, we kind of recovered by going opposite side when they were strong, and then after we recovered, we're on same side, which is drag side. But yeah, they were invading us top, and they were kind of strong.
Garen's kind of still winning, right, against K'Sante? But it's fine, right? Oops. I couldn't do anything. My bad.
I shouldn't have dove so deep. >> [laughter] >> that looks so bad. My bad. My bad. Let's ping for dragon here.
Start the soul fight up. But yeah, this is very high challenger. Right now, we're pushing rank. We're pushing high ranks right like top half of challenger, basically. Everybody is challenger in this game.
Yeah, except for the supports. Those two supports are not challenger. So, this is a full challenger game. I just wanted to speak a little bit about kind of developing your blind read as jungle. You have to really get the sense for it.
I think people don't really talk about it because they don't want to admit it that it actually you actually do need to just guess work a lot of the time. It's like educated guess work is really valuable. That should be it. Well played. Well played.
Well played. Big. All right. >> [sighs] >> That would be it. So, essentially just improving your I guess game sense will help a lot with this.
And the way you do that is by updating your information frequently. We're able to, I think By the way, out jungle Tomeo in this game. I you know, he did go CS up lead, like CS lead on me, but I think that's actually normal in this match up. Like, I don't expect to out farm a Zyra. Zyra's the fastest clearing champion in the game.
I think by far. So, there's no chance There's no situation where I'm going to out farm Zyra. Like, I already accept that, right? I wrote a little PDF book about counter match-ups, and this is one of them. Zyra has range, Zyra has CC, Zyra has faster clear, Zyra can run around and just, you know, destroy team fights and skirmishes, like and he's also high challenger pro player, you know, pro coaching staff, pro every like just he's you know, he actually plays the champion as well, like sees 65% win rate over 50 games, right?
Over 40 games. It's he like he's not bad, right? Like I'm saying like he's essentially I'm not abusing like some, you know, like masters like I'm not even in masters, basically. Like this is high challenger, right? So, this is essentially what you want to do is you want to build your repetitions on a champion so that you can fight against these players who have a lot of experience on and pro like basically a lot of staff and pro coaching and stuff like that, right?
So, you just want to build your own game plan and kind of stick to it. Of course, you know, we did have Quante. He is 1,900 LP challenger pushing for rank 10, so I mean, in my opinion, he didn't really perform too well this game. He kind of got wrecked by Zyra. And of course, good on Zyra to recognize this.
So, of course, like this is kind of, you know, there's a little bit of everything here. But yeah, so definitely just try to develop your blind read. More on this later. It's just essentially taking in all the information that a game kind of offers to you and deciding the play and just feeling it out whether you win on your champion against them or not. Right?
There's a lot of fights that had we gone in, we would have died instantly. Right? Like you have to kind of be the judge of that in the heat of the moment, you know, and just right then and there, you have to kind of judge for yourself. So, you know, of course, I do have a lot of experience. This does take a little bit of time, but developing this kind of blind read on mechanical situations and you know, also what you should do, like kind of go opposite or don't go opposite or fight or don't fight or contest or don't contest.
Like this is very important, right? We were able to contest him on bot Krugs because we had three people there and they had two people. So, and then we were able to fight them at Dragon because, again, we had numbers advantage. But the thing is >> [snorts] >> there's certain times where this also may not make sense for you on your champion. Like let's say if he was up, you know, one more level, maybe, you know, we don't win that actually, you know, it's it depends.
So, I would say, you know, do kind of I think I played pretty well this game. Maybe the mid dive was a little questionable, but I did burn his flash and I killed him. So, I think it was fine, honestly. But, yeah, like I think it was okay. Because my camps were down and, you know, things like that.
But, yeah, just rewatch the game if you want. And then, you know, just kind of see what decisions we're making. This is, you know, kind of my Elo, so we're going to be okay with it. So, thanks guys for watching and I will catch you guys in the next one.
Go deeper: the books behind this guide
Everything above is compressed from full volumes. The books carry the complete systems and the edge cases, with the reasoning at full length.
Written by Vambient, a two-time Rank 50 NA peak jungler. In Season 6, I primarily played Nidalee and Elise with some variety. I currently specialize in Rek'Sai. These guides are built from the decisions I use in my own games. About Vambient · how the books are made.