FAQ & How BPGG Works

How competitive drafting works

Every professional game of League of Legends begins with a draft. The two teams alternate through two ban phases and two pick phases: each team removes up to five champions from the game entirely and selects five to play. In the standard tournament draft, three bans per team are made before any pick, the first six picks follow, then two more bans per team, and finally the last four picks.

The draft is asymmetric by design. The blue side picks first, which lets it secure the single strongest champion on the patch — but the red side picks last, choosing its final champion with the entire enemy composition visible. This tension between first-pick power and last-pick information is the engine of most drafting strategy, and it is why BPGG tracks pick order as its own statistic.

Bans matter far more in professional play than in ordinary games. Teams scout each other's champion pools, remove signature picks from specific players, and use bans to protect the composition they prepared. When a champion is banned in nearly every game, it may never appear on the Rift and still dominate the meta — this is why Presence (bans plus picks) is BPGG's headline metric rather than pick rate alone.

Each of BPGG's views looks at this same process from a different angle: Ban/Pick Stats measures how contested each champion is, Pick Order shows whether it is a blind pick or a counter pick, Synergy captures the pairings teams draft as a package, and Counters records what has actually beaten a champion when it did get through the draft.

Where the data comes from and how it is updated

BPGG's match data comes from Oracle's Elixir, a public dataset of professional League of Legends matches that is widely used by analysts and broadcast teams. An automated batch job runs every day, appends newly played pro games, and redeploys the site, so statistics stay current without manual work.

Statistics are aggregated per game and grouped by game patch. By default most views show a window of the most recent patches, and every view can be filtered by region; league codes that changed over the years (for example EU LCS becoming the LEC) are mapped to their present-day regions. Some views apply a minimum sample threshold — the Counters view, for instance, hides matchups with fewer than 10 games — to avoid presenting statistical noise as insight.

BPGG is read-only: there are no accounts, nothing to sign up for, and no user data involved. Details on privacy and advertising are on the Privacy Policy page.

Frequently asked questions