Greed is a sum with a missing term
Every greedy play is a real gain. The wave is real gold. The plate is real gold. The kill on the fleeing enemy is real. The play is greedy when the possible loss was larger than the gain and was not counted. A death at fourteen minutes costs the respawn, the wave that crashes into the tower during it, and often the objective the enemy takes while you are grey. That is a thousand gold of loss chased for a wave worth a hundred and fifty.
The coach can see both terms. It knows the gold at stake in the wave, the plate or the kill, and it knows what the death cost in shutdown, lost farm and the objective taken while dead.
What it looks like in your footage
- One more wave with the enemy missing. The player stays for a wave when the readout says an enemy has been unseen for a while and the player's own recall would have been safe ten seconds earlier.
- A dive or a chase at low health. The health readout is under 40 percent at the decision point and the player is moving toward the enemy, not away.
- A kill chased into fog. The player follows a low-health enemy past the point where they can see what is behind them.
- Gold in the pocket. The player has enough unspent gold for an item and stays in lane anyway. The item would have made the next fight; the wave did not.
Why greed feels like good play
Because it often works. A player who takes the extra wave nine times out of ten gets nine waves and one death, and the nine waves are remembered as the reward for being aggressive. The death is remembered as bad luck. The review is where the arithmetic gets done: nine waves at 150 gold each is 1,350, and the one death cost more than that once the tower, the objective and the shutdown are added.
The one change
The point of naming the loss is that greed lives in the unspoken half of the sum. Once it is said, the play usually does not get made.
A drill for your next five games
Set one rule for the five games: when you have enough gold for your next item, you go back on the next safe window, whatever the wave is doing. Count the deaths in those five games and compare with your last five. Most players find the death count drops and the farm does not, because the item bought on time wins the lane back faster than the wave it cost.
How the coach catches it
Leaguio Coach tags greed when the decision frame shows a gain being chased past a measured risk: low health moving forward, an enemy unseen with a safe recall available, gold in the pocket with an item available, a chase into fog. The readout on the storyboard states the health and the unseen enemies, and the text states the gold at stake on both sides. It is a different tag from overextending, which is about depth alone, and from recall timing, which is about when the reset should have happened.