It was announced earlier this week but I’d be remiss in my duties if I didn’t pour one out to Uzi, one of the greatest to ever play the game, who retired due to health reasons. Below are a collection of his absolutely ridiculous stats. We’ll probably never see another player like him.
Accomplishments: Worlds Runner-up 2013 and 2014, 2018 Mid-Season Invitational Champion, Worlds Top 8 2016, Worlds Top 4 2017, Worlds Top 8 2018, 2x LPL Champion, 3x LPL Runner-up, Back-to-back All-Star 1v1 Champion,
Career Stats (includes exhibitions):
683 games, 412 wins – 271 losses (60.3%)
3553 kills – 1526 deaths – 3821 assists (4.83 KDA)
9.75 cs per minute (over 230,000 creeps killed)
Advanced Metrics (since 2013 worlds):
5.1 KDA, 10.0 cs per minute, 471 gold per minute, 71.2% kill participation
Ahead in CS at 15 mins 77.5%, CS differential @ 15 mins +12.8 (two waves…)
XP differential @ 15 mins +417 (about two waves)
First blood victim 0.8%, first blood participant 4.1% (Ming was only first blood victim 2.2%, 3% as a bot lane is insane)
607.9 damage per minute (again, since Worlds 2013… think about that)
Highest CS per minute every single LPL season he ever played in full-time
7 Pentakills (3 on Vayne)
Most kills in professional history. First to 500, 1000, 1500, 2000, 2500, 3000, 3500
Reached 100 kills in first 14 games of his career (avg 7.1 kills per game)
Many of his rate statistics would qualify as an MVP caliber individual season and he maintained them since 2013. He’s the best to ever play the position and one of the best to ever play the game. Unfortunately he was never crowned a World Champion.
We’ll miss you Uzi.
Friday, June 5th Recap
EDward Gaming vs Team WE (Net: +1.4 units)
This was a bizarre series. EDG dominated game one and looked well on their way to a dominant, speed-run style victory in game two before they got overconfident and took an unnecessary fight before the fourth dragon which allowed Team WE back into the game and to eventually earn the win. I said it in the Discord but if I’m EDG’s coach, every player is running laps for that. WE took the momentum into game three where EDG did a weird substitution bringing in Jiejie. Look, we don’t know if Junjia was tilted or not or if this was strictly a strategic decision (having a bench jungler watch pathing is extremely potent and won SKT a world championship) but it felt odd after Junjia had two outstanding games. Either way, we cashed our underdog special and just barely missed on the total in game one which landed on 26, just shy of the 26.5.
LNG Esports vs Suning Gaming (Net: -5.05 units)
I picked the wrong game to go heavier on totals and should probably just stick to even weight even if the projections suggest a line is highly incorrect. Save the weight for extreme circumstances, this wasn’t one of them.
LNG looked absolutely awful in this series, particularly in game one. They lacked direction and were WAY overcautious. At one point they had pushed Suning back and had a free dragon, positioned for it, and then just walked away for absolutely no reason. Both teams felt a little nervous at times in this series so maybe it was just nerves but to me this is a red flag. LNG play with absolutely no feel whatsoever. I also thought the new coaching staff might change the identity of this team and while that still may happen eventually, it certainly didn’t look like it in this game. They’re too timid.
In good news we should get a nice juicy low total number in the next game for both of these teams which will let us get good value on an over. I may not play it in the LNG series but Suning will almost definitely loosen up a bit after this one. LNG just sort of rolled over and died and most teams won’t do that.
Daily Total Net: -3.65 units
Not a great start but LNG at least gave us some very pertinent data points, namely that they haven’t changed yet, to move forward with. Constant evaluation and adjustments are what the long game is about.
I had a few questions regarding the “Live Trading” section that I had during the Mid-Season Cup. Along with some of the prop markets I’ll be waiting for more of a sample size before diving into these plays and I’m not planning on playing many maps live unless I see a massive draft advantage. I’ll put any plays in the Discord.
ON TO SATURDAY!
LPL Summer 2020
Week 1 – Day 2
Victory Five +168 (+1.5 maps @ -200) vs
Dominus Esports -217 (-1.5 maps @ +154)
Kill Total: 26.5 (-110 over / -119 under)
Kill Spread: +5.5 @ -128 / -5.5 @ -102
Time Total: 34:00
V5 – Biubiu, Weiwei, Mole, SamD, ppgod
DOM – Natural, Xiaopeng, Twila, Helper, Mitsuki
Trends:
Dominus were 2 – 0 (2 – 0 ATS) as favorites in Spring
V5 were 0 – 16 (1 – 15 ATS) as underdogs in Spring
Dominus won the Spring matchup 2 – 0.
Victory Five are coming off of the single worst season in professional LOL history winning just a single game with a final game record of 1 – 32. As expected they’ve made a lot of changes. They brought in the top+jungle duo Biubiu and Weiwei from Suning, retained Mole, their best player last split, and brought up two of the more promising prospects from the LDL in SamD and ppgod. Get the laughs out now, we’ll be writing about him multiple times a week… I’ll give you a second…. ok let’s focus!
Dominus switched out the solid but not spectacular bottom lane of GALA and Mark with their academy team’s bottom lane duo of Helper and Mitsuki. GALA and Mark weren’t bad so it’s tough to tell whether or not this will really affect things much or not. Twila is just Xiaowei from last season (side note: He switched from Twila to Xiaowei and now back to Twila… pick one dude come on now this is like a mid life crisis at age 21).
Both of these teams finished in the bottom two positions last season and I very much expect that could be the case again but the difference is that Victory Five were playing last season with half of a roster worth of LPL quality players and Dominus are running back a very similar lineup. The line last time around was Dominus -478 / V5 +296 but it was also at a point where Victory Five had a single game win in 12 best-of-three’s heading into the bout.
Dominus are one of the few top lane-centric teams on the planet. They devote the majority of their draft equity and in-game resources to Natural, their best player. I’ve equated this to the triple-option offense in college football. It’s not an optimal strategy but if you get good enough at it, like Army or Navy for instance, it can be your specialty and you’ll steal wins from time to time. There’s a lot of long, complicated reasons why it’s a suboptimal strategy but it basically has to do with allocation of players across the map, missed experience, and overall power of top lane champions not usually being high enough to make the impact worth it to commit to the strategy.
I mentioned in my pre-season tier list article that Dominus’ season, especially early on, is going to be defined by what they choose to concentrate on. Their coach who joined halfway through last season identified that playing through Natural is their best option. If they remain the top-centric team they’ll probably start the season off strong and perhaps even upset some better teams that don’t know how to adjust and handle it. However, if they choose to develop and work on other strategies this team is going to take their lumps for awhile but it will be better for both the individual players and the team in the long run to establish the ability to do other things. LPL teams tend to be very stubborn and “set in their ways” but you can interpret the roster moves a few ways. Perhaps they think this bottom lane can carry and they’ll have to focus less on getting Natural ahead. If that’s the case then we can expect them to be developing other strategies and to struggle while making adjustments. If you think this is just a plug-and-play fill-in for GALA and Mark, like I do, then I feel like we might see more of the same.
Regardless of what identity Dominus will have initially, this is a significantly closer matchup this time around. Victory Five might not be a good team, as a matter of fact they will almost definitely finish last place again (although I don’t know, LNG looked awful this morning) but that doesn’t mean they’re the same quality of team that they were last season. Dominus moved laterally while Victory Five made substantial upgrades to serviceable LPL players. Dominus shouldn’t be favored by this much over ANY LPL team. Period.
I got this line at Victory Five +275 yesterday when Dominus were -417 favorites. I did not expect that much line movement on a team that won a single game last season. In the future, I’ll be putting “early” plays into these articles and then writing on them the next day so that you all have the same action I do. Apologies for making you miss this beautiful closing line value. I still think Victory Five are a decent play at the current number.
Other markets:
I’ll be waiting for more data before looking into first bloods, first towers, and dragons unless it’s teams that have the same players and will likely have the same identity. You’ll find those markets in this section in the future.
As I mentioned in yesterday’s write-up, I love under time totals and over kill totals early in the Summer season based on historical trends and the “makes sense” argument I talked about extensively yesterday regarding comfort and continuity going into the Summer from Spring vs offseason into Spring.
The time total went under in three out of five opportunities yesterday and I like the play again today independent of that result.
My Composite Combined Kills per Game (cCKPG) has this kill total at 29.24 kills. My odds-weighted projection, which is an odds-weighted blend of kills per win (KPW) and kills per loss (KPL) composite averages has this total at 27.82 kills. In a projected underdog win, in this case Victory Five, 28.67 kills. A few of these numbers are skewed because V5 only had a single game win at 21 kills last season but if we kick that back to the league average we get 26.76 kills on the odds-weighted and 26.22 on the implied underdog win. Victory Five were a bit of a clown fiesta in their games last season boasting the second highest combined kills per minute in the league only to Invictus Gaming partially because they’d just fight non-stop with their non-traditional team compositions and lane swaps. I think we’ll see a lot less of that this season than we did last season. Unders hit in four out of five on day one but I’m still taking the over in this match for the reasons stated yesterday regarding the Spring-to-Summer transition.
My Picks:
Spread: Victory Five +1.5 maps @ -135 (1.35 units)
Moneyline: Victory Five +275 (0.5 units)
Spread: Victory Five -1.5 maps @ +605 (0.1 units)
Time Total: Map 1 UNDER 34:00 @ -120 (0.6 units)
Time Total: Map 2 UNDER 34:00 @ ??? (??? units)(currently OTB)
Kill Total: Map 1 OVER 26.5 @ -110 (0.55 units)
Kill Total: Map 2 OVER 26.5 @ -112 (0.56 units)
Oh My God! (OMG) +124 (+1.5 maps @ -250) vs
Royal Never Give Up -159 (-1.5 maps @ +191)
Kill Total: 24.5 (-112 over / -116 under)
Kill Spread: +2.5 @ -110 / -3.5 @ -110
Time Total: 34:00 (-114 over / -114 under)(see description)
OMG – Aliez, H4cker, Icon, Smlz, Cold
RNG – New, XLB, Xiaohu, Betty, Ming
Trends:
RNG were 5 – 7 (3 – 9 ATS) as favorites in Spring
RNG failed to cover the spread (0 – 3) when favorites of -260 or shorter
OMG were 3 – 7 (5 – 5 ATS) as underdogs in Spring
OMG were 3 – 2 (3 – 2 ATS) as underdogs of +100 to +172
RNG won the Spring matchup 2 – 1 as -654 favorites
First I want to address something I’ve talked about a lot already but I’m putting it here again so I don’t need to type it out, AGAIN. RNG added 705 and while we could debate the quality difference between him and the departed Langx, just keep in mind that 705 was signed this past weekend (5/31). That’s not a lot of time to get acclimated or even travel to the team facilities. New (former Meow from Vici) is very likely just an emergency substitution. He was probably in the area, has been playing the LDL for a few years now, and was possibly a prospect RNG were considering anyway since they signed him until 2021. Similarly, Cryin was re-signed, since he was technically on loan to eStar, just a few days earlier. . DO NOT FREAK OUT ABOUT THIS! It’s just RNG being diligent and making sure to have a contingency plan and because these players were just signed. Relax…
All of that said, we still have this match to handicap and it’s very difficult to do so with relative unknowns like New. While he wasn’t very impressive in his previous showings on Vici it was multiple years ago and having not watched much of his LDL tape, I simply don’t know how he’ll look. For the sake of this handicap, let’s operate under the assumption that he’s a “bad” top laner.
OMG are starting Aliez over Curse which is just the weirdest flex. Curse has been a solid player since playing full-time. I’m not really sure if this was OMG’s plan or if this is another example of the COVID-19 offseason affecting things. Aliez isn’t terrible but was probably the worst top laner in the LPL last season. In his defense, it’s fairly difficult to evaluate many of the Victory Five players because of all the shenanigans and overall poor quality that the team had but even on an individual level he was far from impressive. Perhaps he turns over a new leaf but I suppose we’ll find out.
Both of these teams were infuriating last season. RNG with their poor drafts and macro play and OMG with their ridiculously stubborn insistence on laning for as long as humanly possible even against teams that outclassed them. Overall, RNG are a far superior team and I think their problems are a bit easier fix than OMG’s systemic stubbornness but I can’t operate under these assumptions so this will be a pass. I don’t think laying -159 with a team that lost as hard as RNG did in drafts is such a good idea even if I think they’ll fix at least a few of their issues. If I was getting a better number on OMG I’d give it a shot but I’m just staying away from the sides in this matchup.
Other Markets:
There was an errant line over at 5D that had both the 33:00 and 35:00 totals listed at the same odds. I hit the under. Both of these teams prefer to play it a little slow but I’m still sticking to my under time/over kills angle based on the Spring-to-Summer transition. We’re also getting low totals and we have two new (get it?) top laners in this game that could prove a bit wild.
My Composite Combined Kills per Game (cCKPG) has this kill total at 23.95 kills. My odds-weighted projection, which is an odds-weighted blend of kills per win (KPW) and kills per loss (KPL) composite averages has this total at 23.94 kills. Time-total implied kills (avg of both teams CKPM*implied time total) is 24.99 kills. In a projected underdog win, in this case OMG, 24.84 kills.
My Picks:
Time Total: Map 1 UNDER 35:00 @ -114 (0.57 units)
Time Total: Map 2 UNDER ??? @ ??? (??? units)
Kill Total: Map 1 OVER 24.5 @ -112 (0.56 units)
Kill Total: Map 2 OVER 24.5 @ -114 (0.57 units)
See you all bright and early tomorrow!
