In LoL, there are 143 total champions to choose from, each with a unique skill set; both teams pick 5 to play as well as 5 to ban the opposing team from picking. Tahm Kench has a few special abilities, but two, in particular, make him a significant threat:

He has the ability to suck a teammate into his belly, protecting them from damage (keeping them alive) He has the ability to teleport across the map and bring one teammate with him.

I wanted to dig into his actual value.

In 113 matches that I analyzed from the spring split, Tahm Kench was the third most used champion. On the flip side, he was only the 14th most banned champion (29 times).

In my mind, given his range of abilities and the threat he poses, he should have been banned at a much higher rate (Used 42 times, banned 29 leaves him available in 37% of other matches).

Value of Tahm Kench

Let’s take a look at how Tahm Kench potentially affected matches. Since one of his fundamental abilities is to keep teammates alive, I wanted to know how well he was doing with that. On average, teams with Tahm Kench on their side died nine times per match compared to nearly 11 times without. To dig deeper, we’ll split the analysis by when a team wins and loses.

This is exactly what I expected! With Tahm Kench in the lineup, almost across the board there are fewer deaths — with the exception of the case when a team wins, which seems like an outlier.

Lets talk team role

In LoL there are five different roles that players play in a match, any champion may be used in any position, but many champions are primarily only used for specific roles. For Tahm Kench, he’s typically played as a support champion whose primary goal is to work closely with their team’s ADC (Attack Damage Carry — their job is to deal a lot of damage), so keeping their ADC alive is a massive part of the benefit of using Tahm Kench.