The 18-year-old Ryu “Keria” min-seok is making waves in LoL. The support player is a beacon of hope in the otherwise bleak valley where T1 finds itself. Keria reinterprets his role as a supporter in League of Legends. He plays unusual champions like Lee Sin and racks up kills with them.
This is Keria:
- At just 16 years old, Keria began his career at Kingzone Dragon. However, coach cvMax quickly discovered the potential of the young support: cvMax is considered a controversial coach, who supposedly once choked a player, but he also has an extremely keen sense for talent.
- Under cvMax, Keria shone in 2020 for “DRX”, which made it to the Worlds 2020 as an underdog team. After the tournament, however, the team disbanded. 4 of the players had become major stars within a year and moved on.
- Since November 2020, Keria has been playing for T1, the most legendary team in League of Legends, alongside three-time world champion “Faker”. Keria is still only 18 but has fought his way into a starting position at T1, replacing the 20-year-old Effort, who now plays for Liv Sandbox.
Why is the support role in LoL so thankless? The support player is the only role in League of Legends that does not collect kills and death blows for themselves but fulfills other tasks:
- They are responsible for healing, supporting, or protecting their own players
- They are supposed to “clear the map” – always placing wards so that their team maintains vision
- The supporter is often responsible for crowd control
- The supporter is also often seen as an “easy target”. It is expected that they will “sacrifice themselves for the team” to cover a retreat or save a “more important” hero. They are often the priority target that is picked off quickly in team fights as a “soft target”.
It is certainly the role in LoL where one can shine the least. Essentially, it applies:
- If a supporter does their job perfectly, no one really notices
- But if the supporter messes up, they are the first to get into trouble and get flamed by fans saying “They’re not doing anything – they just die”.
Keria shines with unusual champions and as an aggressive Thresh
What makes Keria so special? The 18-year-old has a wide champion pool and plays as a support what is needed at the moment.
- In particular, he is known for his play as “Thresh”: The aggressive support champion has the potential in Keria’s hands to win games single-handedly, by snagging opponents with his hook and positioning them so they become easy targets.
- However, Keria also plays completely unconventional picks: In a match where the opponents played Aphelios-Thresh, he showed up with a bot lane as Kallista-Neeko. After the game, the opponents were quoted as saying: “We almost lost our minds”.
- One of the strangest picks was when Keria decided to go with “Lee Sin”: The blind monk is usually played as a jungler. But Keria used him in the bot lane, achieving 5/3/2 with Lee Sin and even scoring a solo kill on the enemy bot laner. Keria remarked that he believes every “top-tier champion” can shine in any role. Therefore, he trains with them.
Here in the Twitch clip, you can see how Keria decides a game with a perfect fight initiation:
Meanwhile, however, Keria continues to take on the classic support tasks. The supporter is responsible for map control and the team’s vision. Keria leads the LCK in the following stats:
- “Wards per minute” (1.9)
- “Control wards per minute” (0.7).
This is how Keria is seen in Korea: In his first year as a professional with DRX, Keria earned nicknames like “Monster Rookie” or “Genius”, during which he also won the “Young Player” award of the LCK. He became known for frequently visiting the top lane and causing unrest there.
Currently, Keria is the great hope for the veteran Faker, who is nearing the end of his career at 25 and has not won a world championship title for 5 years.
Keria, at 18, is still at the beginning of his career and wants to reach the level where Faker is today:
“In the long run, I want to have a career as great as Faker. I know it will be difficult, but I want to be the supporter who has won the most championships.”
Keria
T1 and Faker desperately need the help. Things have not been going well for them in recent years. Recently, T1 fired its world champion coaches:
LoL: T1 bought Faker 2 brilliant world champion coaches – Fired them after only 7 months
