With LoL finishing up their season today, congrats to Damwon Gaming on their World Championship, the time is right to get back into these Dota streets. For those of you coming over from LoL, I wrote this article to compare Dota and LoL and give a brief intro to Dota.
Results :
Summer Split Total: 54-50 +6.62 units (5.78% ROI)
Since it’s been a little while since my last Dota content, I’ve decided call that the “Summer Split” even though Dota doesn’t actually break it up like that like LoL does, it’s really just constant tournaments especially now with no TI. Usually there’s a brief break after TI that constitutes the off-season, but with TI postponed indefinitely, that doesn’t exist this year. Anyways, I’ll keep the year to date total running, but will also be tracking starting fresh now.
Without further ado, let’s jump into the games in NA on Saturday. We’re in group stage play, all of the series are best of 2 contests. There’s been a couple of roster changes/renames since I last covered the region, I’ll point them out when we come across them. The games on Saturday are:
4 Zoomers (-1.5 maps @ +175) vs
Beastcoast (+1.5 maps @ -245) 4:00 pm EST
These teams have matched up surprisingly few times given that it’s been the same 8-10 teams from NA and SA facing off against each other for the last 7 months. They’ve somehow only met 4 times. 4 Zoomers is up 3-1 in those matchups, with a map score of 6-2. In general, 4 Zoomers has been solid of late, only losing to Quincy Crew and splitting against Catjammers (formerly Cr4Zy, don’t let the absurd name fool you this is a legit team) and Team Zero, which is basically the Business Associates roster they were last playing with, also a solid team. Beastcoast on the other hand, have been very hit or miss. They managed to 2-0 Catjammers, but that’s their only actual 2-0 at the tournament (their other win is a forfeit). They had 1-1’s against Spirits and Infamous.
Overall, my math says 4 Zoomers should win about 2/3 of maps against Beastcoast. This would mean they get a 2-0 about 44% of the time. The +175 only implies a 36% chance to get the 2-0, so I think we have some decent value here.
My Pick:
4 Zoomers -1.5 maps +175 (1 unit)
Quincy Crew (-1.5 maps @ -472) vs
Team Brasil (+1.5 maps @ +309) 6:00 pm EST
These have only met twice, as Team Brasil formed relatively recently. They were both Bo2 matchups, Quincy Crew won one and tied once for a map score of 3-1 in Quincy Crew’s favor. Team Brasil have shown they can at least compete with the best teams in the region, but Quincy Crew are head and shoulders above anyone else. They’re a clean 6-0 so far in this tournament, and I expect them to make it 7-0 this series.
That said, I also don’t see much value in the betting lines. I’d give Quincy Crew about a 90% chance to win each map, which means a roughly 81% chance to win 2-0. The -472 line implies an 82.5% chance, so I don’t see any value here. On the flip side, this gives Team Brasil a 19% chance to take a game, but the +309 implies a ~24% chance. With no value on either side here, I’ll be staying away.
My Pick:
No action
Team Zero (-1.5 @ +220) vs
Thunder Predator (+1.5 @ -315) 8:00 pm EST
Going back to May, when the Team Zero (playing as Business Associates at the time) roster started to resemble the current roster, the series is 8-7 in maps in favor of Team Zero. There was a period of time over the summer when Thunder Predator looked like the clear top team in SA. However, they’ve fallen on hard times of late, recently dropping maps to teams like “Egoboys” and “Hokori”. They did also take a game off of Catjammers recently, so it’s not like they’ve 100% fallen off of a cliff, but they aren’t quite the team they were earlier in the summer. Despite the new name, Team Zero are still their same wildly inconsistent selves. They have 3 wins so far this tournament, but 2 are against the open qualifier teams.
Overall, my numbers have this as about 55/45 per map in Team Zero’s favor. This leads to about a 30% chance that Team Zero gets a 2-0. +220 implies a 31.3% chance, so there’s no value there. On the other side, -315 implies a ~75% chance for Thunder Predator to win at least 1 game, while based on my math that number should be at about 70%. Unfortunately, there’s also no value on that side.
My Pick:
No action
Bit of a boring slate to get us started back up, but when the games are priced accurately I prefer not to bet than to force action. With the limited lines (their aren’t very often kill O/Us or any of the more exotic offerings you see in LoL) offered in Dota we end up with no action on a series a decent amount of the time.
