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　　Moment of truth between Team Liquid and LGD.Cn at The International 2013

　　For a long time these upsets were something that was believed to be only an oddity of the Western scene, with the disciplined Chinese being immune to such foibles, but with CIS and DT^Club dealing out drubbings to the likes of NewBee, iG and LGD over the past week it's now clear that upsets are a fact of life, one which we should take some time to better understand.

　　Depending on who you ask, upsets are seen as either signs of the instability of top teams, their lack of caring or the rise of new and talented players to challenge the status quo. Often times fans have ready made excuses for when they happen, seldom involving admitting any fault in their own team or giving any credit to the opponent. For all the talk about these surprise victories the public discourse has been fairly poor at pinpointing why they happened and what the likelihood of the team finding continued success might be. It’s a question that I’ve given some thought to over the years, perhaps ever since I predicted Power Rangers would become a big hit...back in April of 2012. Almost two years later I’m still waiting for this team to truly establish themselves as one of the big players on the scene, but studying their road and the roads traveled by other teams like them can give us some interesting insights into why the underdogs so frequently cause us to lose all of our rares.

　　

How the underdog wins the big game

ppd is the young new captain of Evil Geniuses and a HoN transplantA team is considered an underdog when they are perceived to be less skilled, less experienced or lacking in some other way. They’ve usually not shown anything remarkable of late, perhaps they haven’t been seen playing in a major competition for a while or have mainly been playing weaker opponents, where their possible victories haven’t proven that they should yet be taken seriously. This glosses over the fact that Dota 2 is not just a game of individual skill, and that there’s a lot of very talented players who just don’t quite make the cut. As Dominik ‘Black^’ Reitmeier mentioned in his recent tweet about leaving China, pro players tend to have their own circles from which they recruit players for new teams, something which certainly was true for Western teams as well in the early days of Dota 2. Over time more players have crossed this border with in particular former HoN pro’s now being mostly accepted as potential teammates, Peter ‘ppd’ Dager and Ludwig ‘Zai’ Wåhlberg being the two latest to break into the scene with Evil Geniuses. However, even as the scene grows and becomes more open, there’s a limited amount of top teams and a limited amount of spots on these teams, leaving quite a few talented young players on the outside, forming teams of their own and laying the groundwork for all those upsets.

　　Skilled players are however not enough, as your opponents will be at least as skilled as you if not more so. No, in order for an upset to happen the underdog team also has to have a solid strategy, oftentimes developed in relative isolation and running counter to the current meta at the pro level. This exploits certain weaknesses of professional teams, as when played at the highest level Dota is a very punishing game where you have little time to react and must rely on instinctual knowledge to pull off many of the big plays that end up making the highlight reels of tournaments. This goes beyond simply someone like WehSing ‘SingSing’ Yuen having mastered every aspect of hitting those Mirana’s Sacred Arrows, but also knowing precisely where the edge is against the common heroes he is likely to face in a competitive environment. When you take such a player out of their comfort zone by forcing them to playing against heroes which they aren't comfortable with they are more prone to make mistakes simply because they aren't as good at telling where that edge is any longer. They may just miss out on a kill or chase just that few feet too far, allowing the underdog to turn things around on them and gain momentum, counteracting the more well known players individual skill and knowledge advantage.

　　Alliance executing one of their once only strategies against DK in G-1 Champions LeagueThere’s also another grander aspect of this theorem, in that it is more difficult to pick and ban against unorthodox strategies, especially if you aren't entirely familiar with their interactions or laning. An example of this might be Alliance run at G-1 Champions League Season 5 last year, where their different style of play caught the Chinese entirely off guard even though they were aware of the heroes that were being played in the West. A more recent example is Chinese team CIS who admitted in a recent interview that they use unconventional heroes to throw their opponents off their game. They have in particular been getting good mileage out of using strong initiation heroes in order to prevent or punish their opponents when they try to stop Sniper from pushing down towers with his extreme range, working against the traditional view of Sniper as just a fragile carry hero. This is a strategy which can and will be countered over time, but which along with their usage of Skeleton King and Invoker was enough to allow them to pick off NewBee and nearly take out DK in the third Sina Cup, before falling out of the competition against LGD.

　　

Why the favourites don’t always win

Ferrari's Night Stalker was working wonder during the G-1 groupstagesIf we consider this problem from the opposite perspective, the first thing to note is that great teams aren’t always great. As was alluded to in the previous part, there’s a fluctuation in Dota when it comes to the strength of heroes and strategies which depends on unfamiliarity, and this fluctuation also influences how heroes and strategies move in and out of the professional metagame. The more certain heroes are played; the more late 2012 Team Empire run aggressive trilanes and the more Complexity goes for their smoke ganks, the more obvious these decisions become.

　　A profound example came in the form of Fei Chi ‘Ferrari_430’ Luo’s Night Stalker which iG ran extensively after the second International, finding kills all over the map through well executed aggression. However, at the finals of G-1 Champions League Season 4 the hero suddenly stopped working. Having studied his movements, Ferrari's opponents had figured out when he would leave the lane and what he would prefer to seek out, causing him to go entirely without kills. This is how heroes and strategies run their course in Dota, simply finding themselves victims of their own successes, which in turn leads to a natural cycle of fluctuating power for most of the top teams. Add to this other factors which can affect unit cohesion within a team such as personal commitments, fluctuating motivation, exhaustion and roster changes and it’s clear that certain teams will at certain points be more prone to losing to underdog teams simply due to being in a relatively weak position overall.

　　But it’s not just weak teams who may fall prey to those on the upswing of a new strategy. There exists a fundamental case of information asymmetry between professional teams and those who would aim to challenge them, which is further exacerbated before big tournaments when the professional teams are expected to be in their best shape. Because the top teams generally only consider other top teams their real competition in a long tournament they tend to focus all of their time and effort at understanding the teams they play the most. These are the teams they either scrim against or study and for whom they develop special counter strategies. When an event like The International is on the horizon, even strong up-and-coming teams like Kaipi garner no attention whatsoever, simply because they aren’t among the other 15 teams invited to the event. And even then each team is going to prioritize preparing for select big name teams like Na`Vi, Alliance, DK or LGD. While it may seem reasonable to study every opponent before you face them, it’s simply not possible for most teams to do this research to a sufficient degree, instead simply relying on outplaying less threatening teams.

　　Fnatic had a rough time in their first game against TongFu in the winners bracket at TI3Finally there are teams who simply favour an experiential approach to learning. These teams benefit more from playing against a given team or strategy than from researching and watching replays. This again goes back to the concept of instinctual knowledge but also plays on mentality, as these teams are naturally going to feel more at ease against an opponent they’ve faced multiple times before. Many balked at Alliance “dodging” Fnatic during the playoffs of TI3, but the truth is that Fnatic is one such team who learn a lot through playing against their opponents, and as a consequence they've always been a team that could give Alliance a run for their money, especially as they've scrimmed against each other since they each entered Dota 2. Instead Fnatic faced TongFu, suffering a horrid defeat in Game 1 before a drawn out Game 2 loss, suffering the consequences of having to learn on the spot how to play against their opponents. Those who follow Fnatic more closely will remember that this is far from an outlier, as Fnatic is one of the more consistent teams in going from defeating the best in a league to losing against teams they are less familiar with, and a large part of this is due to their need to play against a team and a strategy in order to truly understand how to beat it.

　　

How underdogs become consistent players

FIRE became the first big team to make it in Dota 2, attending TI2 as Complexity GamingSo the big question is what makes the difference between a one hit wonder and a team that sticks around. Firstly, let’s consider FIRE, the first true underdog team that broke through from obscurity in Dota 2. They played a strong strategy of Skeleton King and Chen which ran counter to the prevailing metagame of long cooldown teamfight ultimates such as Black Hole and Ravage. This strategy was really potent, and along with their ability to stall games with Dark Seer and find pick-off’s with their patented smoke ganks when they were behind, FIRE had found a strategy which was not easily countered and which would be enough to earn them a sponsorship from Complexity. The key here was that they did not rely on simply surprising their opponents, but on forcing their opponents to change their style of play to work around how FIRE wanted to play. Stronger strategies such as this make for longer lasting impacts and longer relevance. While something like Infused Skeleton King and Ursa double jungling the Ancients is a cool innovation, it’s something you can only do once, just as Power Rangers previous blip on the radar back during the fall of 2013 with aggressive early roaming supports was something which usually worked only once before the top teams were able to adjust their lanes and their play in order to deal with it.

　　The other piece of the puzzle is being able to reinvent yourself as is needed. For Complexity they hit a considerable slump after a particularly devastating loss to Na`Vi which showcased all of the weaknesses of their play. However, as they rebuilt and came back strong they managed to stick around and almost made top 8 at TI2. Similarly Alliance during 2013 were masters of reinventing themselves, leaving behind them the heavy jungle farming of Jacky ‘EternaLEnVy’ Mao and moving into a hard push strategy, building a global strategy around Spectre and Nature’s Prophet and embracing the rat with split pushing Nature’s Prophet before coming up with the Timbersaw mid and embracing the Naga Siren support in the leadup to The International. Teams that break the mold for short periods and then fade away tend to build one strategy that’s easy to counter. Teams who go through strong periods before long weak periods tend to build strong strategies but wait too long to reinvent themselves. The teams who become persistent top contenders are the ones who acknowledge that their strategies are going to lose efficiency over time and prepare new strategies to be deployed once their old ones start to fade.

　　

The latest candidates

Resolut1on has been a big part of the recent success of Team EmpireApplying these criteria to the latest crop of rising stars, it’s clear that Team Empire and Evil Geniuses are in the realm of having developed consistent strategies which have brought them to the top of the current metagame and are likely to allow them to stick around for a while. Of these two Empire has more of a history, as most of the team played together previously in iCCup, being one of those teams on the cusp of breaking through but not quite becoming consistent enough to stay on the top of the scene. Each of these still have to prove that they’re capable of rapidly reinventing themselves, but even if they turn out to be slower on the uptake they have the strength needed to remain a consistently relevant team on the scene. Meanwhile teams such as Power Rangers and Meet Your Makers are managing to take some games off good teams recently, but often end up relying on gimmicks such as MYM against Fnatic in their first game of ASUS ROG Dream League. It should be said though that Power Rangers are making constant progress towards becoming a more stable presence on the scene.

　　For the Chinese scene the bigger threat is DT^Club, who have a history in both WC3 DotA and partially as members of Rising Stars of being able to reach those high finishes, but which have failed to become consistent in the past. Their current run relies on playing against the meta and trying to stall games long enough for their hard carries to take over, benefitting from a certain uncomfortability in their opponents in terms of pressing their early advantages. This strategy will force their opponents to adapt by either slowing down their own play or making more of their mid game lead, but in either case it seems likely that DT will eventually fade away again, as they have in the past. The newcomers CIS are more clearly relying on surprising picks even as they have some strategic depth behind it, but are unlikely to be able to withstand the scrutiny which their newfound successes has put upon them. The more interesting aspect of CIS is in fact that they represent a proof of concept; there are previously unknown teams in China who if given a chance can challenge and take games off of big names, presenting an argument in favour of a more open scene, similar to that of the European one. If the Chinese premier teams were to be forced to play unknown teams more frequently we should see a rise in the amount of upsets, but also help differentiate between the up-and-coming teams and help break up the Chinese metagame whenever it became stagnant, as they would be subject to more frequent assault by outlandish new ideas.

　　

So what’s your take on the latest crop of teams on the rise? Which ones will fade away and which ones will stuck around?