What is an Insec in League of Legends?

The inSec is a classic League of Legends technique involving the champion Lee Sin. Its unique name derives from its namesake, the incredible Lee Sin player and innovator of the move, Choi “inSec” In-seok. The goal of the move is to use Lee Sin's ultimate to kick an enemy champion into the middle of the player’s team.

The technique involves the player’s quick execution of a dash-in through Lee Sin’s target-marking Q, Sonic Wave, and its dash recast, Resonating Strike. As the player flies in towards the target, they get behind them with a quick ward-hop, placing a ward trinket as they redirect to it, and behind the target, with Lee Sin’s W, Safeguard. As they now dash to the ward behind the target, they use Lee Sin’s ultimate, Dragon’s Rage, to kick the enemy champion all the way back into the player’s own team, having managed to get behind them. The Insec combo allows any Lee Sin player the ability to send an enemy way out of position, moving their opponents as they please.

inSec first used the combo that would go on to immortalize his name in the LoL community at the All-Stars Shanghai tournament in 2013, playing for the Korean OGN in a match against the European EU LCS Allstars squad. In a crucial standoff in the botlane, inSec managed to get behind enemy ADC Peter "yellowpete" Wüppen’s Varus and perform the combo, which was originally just off-screen during the broadcast, and was caught in a now-iconic replay moments later. This was the first time most spectators had either seen or conceived of such a technical Lee Sin play, and it left a serious mark on the community.

Today, the Insec has become a standard technique that every competent Lee Sin player is expected to master. However, when it was first landed, it was widely praised for its creativity at a time when Lee Sin's ultimate was used primarily as a finisher. The play became a symbol of the kind of mechanical techniques that make LoL so dynamic, and inSec’s name became synonymous with performing it.

Variations do exist, like flashing instead of ward-hopping, or performing a similar dash-in and send-their-champ-into-your-team play with champions like Tristana. The name of the play has outlasted the competitive career of the player, who retired in 2019, and has somewhat diverged from his username, based on his real given name, now often capitalized “Insec” and not “inSec.” To this day, the term remains in common use, while similar player-derived terms like a MadLife, for hook predictions, or an xPeke, for a backdoor game-end, are getting somewhat less common over time.