Shrinkzxo Profile Joined August 2014 Dotoland 268 Posts Last Edited: 2017-01-26 05:50:01 #1 71 on EG vs EHOME G1:

"It was dog shit."

ImbaTV sat down with 71, the CEO of EHOME and a legend among the Chinese scene to do a Player's Tribune style article. He looks back in retrospective at his career in management and his time overseeing EHOME around TI6. He discusses the circumstances surrounding their roster and games, for which he has some strong words.





What does it take to be a manager today?



I had always been a coach. There wasn’t management work for me to do. Now I have become the manager again and therefore, I took over the associated work. As a result I can’t say I have much experience at the moment and I don’t think we are that good at doing management work. We just have some stuff to share.



I have now had two meetings with the team leader. Awareness was raised that there has to be a captain in every team and we need to have good coordination among team leaders, coaches and captains, in order to will make managers more efficient. I used to be a team leader and a coach. I was very lucky to have DC and 820, who were excellent captains. They are incomparable among hundreds of ppl I led. 820, like DC, started out as an ordinary player that turned into a captain, kind of like passing the torch. So our management style is to create a good captain to ensure him, the team leader, and the coach will form a good managing hierarchy.



There is still great distance between domestic (Chinese) and foreign clubs in terms of management skills. Good management consists of discipline and care. You need to know team member’s personal details. You need to know what size of clothes they wear, their height, weight, birthday, physical condition, personal and familial difficulties. You need even to know why they decided to be a pro and their aim. You need to get to the bottom of all this [to be a good manager.]



We now developed from one or two teams to eight or nine. We now can no longer rely on people to manage people. They must be managed by rules, which means we need to establish said rules. First of all we set up proper captains, team leaders, who need to manage members by the rules. We need to enforce these rules with strength. Like if somebody forgot to turn off the PC or light then he has to be fined. We need to have a sense to save energy. We need to improve our manners. We have to make them take the team as home.











Captains must unite the team



Let me give you an example, two days ago the team leader of our main team was going to wake up the team to train. We start training at 2, so we have to get up around midday. The team leader actually lives in a different house than players, which means he had to come over to do that. But Eleven still didn’t get up after being yelled at. Our team leader had to get him up ten minutes later, to which Eleven said from his bed, “Get up for what?” The team leader stayed in his room for a while and couldn’t do anything, and eventually left. I heard the whole thing. And I was about to drag him up. But I realised this doesn’t solve this problem in the long run. So I emailed LaNm about this incident and asked him to bring it up before training starts. Otherwise the team leader will have too difficult a job. I later went to see their training. When they finished I asked Eleven to come and have a cigarette with me outside. Other players were laughing so hard, but all I wanted to do is have someone to smoke together (no pun intended).



Speaking of the captain, he has to have the authority to unite the team – this is a must. But that is far from enough. He also needs to be good at helping teammates to exploit their potential and to know where they can be most effective. This is where LaNm is not very good, even if his authority in the team is absolute.



I have observed the dota scene for years. Recently in China, it feels like Xiao8 and rOtk are the only really good captains. No matter how they are mocked, their ability is there. In contrast to foreigners, Chinese players are mostly introverts therefore there are very few good captains. There are a lot of good foreign captains like Misery, Fly, Puppey and Kuroky. A good team requires a good captain. The problem with LaNm is that in big tournaments he’s more preoccupied with improving himself from being 100% to 120%, rather than helping teammates getting from 50% to 70% or 80%. So in comparison he has catch up to do vis-à-vis these mature captains. However, I do feel he is improving.



I remember I had a talk with LaNm before TI. I told him that I had a lot of difficulty cooperating with him since he became captain and I listed all of the stuff to him. This is also a thing I talked to him about before Manila; I was much more comfortable cooperating with rOtk. I had more communication with rOtk, he is more positive and his direction is clearer. Also, details need to be sorted out. An individual thought, if kept to itself, is dog shit, no matter how bright the idea is. However, if everyone has the same dog shit in their minds things would be perfect. In that aspect, rOtk is a master.









Coaching styles and big bets



As for a good coach, the standards can be quite varied. Some can do all the work that is required, but others only do the best they can. They are very different. There are also coaches who are inactive and idle. I have a coaching background and coached many teams, so I have a set of style and ideas. But your requirements and tactics for the team should change as the roster changes. When I was at DK I demand the team to be ultra aggressive. But when I copied the same strategy over to EHOME which had Mushi and Inflame, things went horribly wrong. This is when I started rethinking. Patches don’t come into this in any way. It is the fact that your personnel had changed. You have different players with different characteristics. They will have different judgment about what is going on in the game. The new players will also have to digest the strategies you bring to them. When you talked to them about your system they would think they had understood, but once I started to observe them in-game I realized how badly they were doing, so I had to change myself. I had to adjust to the roster and think up some other ideas.



There a lot of things a coach can learn from and I am interested in any competitive sport. I will learn from every good coach, like Phil Jackson, who was very good in coaching the Lakers as well as the Bulls. He was apparently very good at managing big-name players. He’s very casual during the regular season but as soon as the play-offs come, everything is instantly upgraded. You would see the effect of every timeout and the improvement in the quality of defense and the attack system in the playoffs. And every key turn is dealt with smoothly. This is the quality of a good coach. He has total control over the team’s energies. He knows when to preserve team’s strength and when to release it. He also has all the timing in releasing the energy. You also have Mourinho, who evokes very extreme emotions. Both his critics and supporters would acknowledge his flamboyance, but very few people know that he is flamboyant to divert pressure on his players and media attention. Lippi, who coached Guangzhou Evergrande - I read a bit his memoir and he had similar sentiment. Marbury, or Commissar Ma as we call him here, talked and was interviewed after helping Beijing Ducks to win CBA Championship. His words were very insightful, nutritious, demanding and responsible. Every coach and captain can learn from him.



I have been an esports coach for a long time, but the period I remember the most is when I was a CS coach, when we were under really difficult circumstances — we had to pay to play on LAN, in an overseas tournament. For players in that time, being able to play overseas is unequally prestigious as international tournaments were fewer as well. We didn’t have any sponsorship — even the team name was given by myself — teAmart. In 2005 we trained in an abandoned private primary school, where we were the only people there. We had to take an unlicensed taxi for forty minutes after walking half an hour on the mountain to get to the training facility. After ten hours we go through the same way to get back. We couldn’t always get water at home to take showers, so often we have to go the well in pairs of two to take shower in front of local peasants and their ox. It was quite sad and cold, but it was fun as well. It was also the foundation of our friendship and we would definitely do it again if given the chance. But today’s player absolutely wouldn’t do this. They want kill the team leader just bc there is no fruit in the training room or are forced to showering next to a moonwell? Also, how much streaming time will it waste? They all want that money.



As for my most memorable Dota experience, it would have be 2010, but not for the ten titles we won. In WCG Beijing Qualifier, Zhou and dgc’s team came to try to snatch the qualification, and they named us to ‘snipe the strongest team’. We started the tournament by exchanging trash talk and each team bet 5000 rmb against the other. I contributed 2500 and the team gave the rest. I remember when we met in the upper bracket we got stomped badly — back then, we played face to face. Their mid was taunting as they were winning, having said quite a lot insensitive things towards me. I did not mind much but the players thought they lost a lot of face, being very dispirited when we had dinner. I was going to pay the bill but Zhou Yang (KingJ) and Co. wouldn’t let me, saying we must get everything back. Though having said that, I wasn’t actually sure about how things would actually turn out. The story after that is now known to everybody. That qualifier win is particularly important as it established our confidence and friendship. It also gave us the belief not to give up when we were behind in game. Building on that, we made very fast progress and everything was made easy. I could criticise players without reservation — sometimes 820 would start it even before I do. Nowadays you have to think about saving players’ face, which is tiring.









EHOME and TI6



As for EHOME after 2015, I’d say we’ve had peaks and valleys. The peak was at the end of last year, when all other teams were not very strong while LaNm was gaining some understanding of the patch. I remember it as we won R & D Cup, MDL, and SDO back to back to back. Both our form and momentum were great, but I knew the victory would be ephemeral. We talked before that CTY actually likes to farm a lot and that patch’s tempo was very well-suited for him. Kaka’s Earth Spirit, Eleven’s Void and Lone Druid were all very good. Our opponents couldn’t ban all our heroes, so it was normal that we won things. After the new year, there was a new patch and we took a break, so the slump in results was actually expected. The most difficult time for us was probably TI6. Eleven’s grandfather was ill, so we moved Fan to the main squad. Unfortunately, the chemistry that resulted was not good. In the scrims we had with our opponents in the qualifier, we had six teams with whom we had a win-rate less than 60%. After some calculations, I concluded that our chance to win the qualifier is less than 3%, which meant we couldn’t even make it past the qualifier and would have to watch TI at home. This would be a serious problem.



The team was really depressed and the mood was really down, so we had to make to a decision to change things. We had to let Eleven have somebody else look after his grandpa, get him back, and have iceiceice [Translator’s Note: 71 used here and onwards his nickname 'Brother three', which is exactly the same as the slang for Indians in Chinese] to play the carry, which we did not think would solve the problem. We played together for a couple of days until it was the qualifier, in which we definitely lived dangerously — to be honest our team is kind of interesting, we can usually surprise people when everyone is talking us down. But when the comeback was hitting its stride we would start tanking, including this TI. Countless people said we were chasing after the title, which made me almost blush. Not even to mention the bans, if you had a look at our pick stats you would see the number. We did not look like a top team at all. It is true that we shouldn't have lost the first game against EG — the game we lost after getting megas — which a lot of people say was epic. I would say it was dog shit. EG were garbage and we were even more garbage. I don't know where the epic is. We were very timid, our teamplay did not show much sign of progress. We were just playing with our cards shown, which is the surest way to lose. As for Wings, their title win is credible. Their strategy and line-ups are both well-bodied and rich to the point that you can't prepare for them. They were also extremely relaxed. They played TI like pubs. Their Championship was well-deserved.



I think the transfers in this window are all very mediocre for Chinese teams. The team that did very well in terms of signings was EG, who will definitely be a strong team. VG is one of those Chinese teams who has done better, others are kind of lackluster. In the beginning we wanted Maybe as our Carry, but he told us he wanted to go to VG.P more. Sylar actually came to us and we thought he was decent. We thought about having ChuaN as our position 4, who would make a decent support duo with LaNm, but our negotiations fell through. Then we heard about the rumour that Wings might disband because faith_bian was going to University in a foreign country (U.S. possibly). I therefore was thinking having iceice and Fenrir as our supports and have LaNm as coach, only to discover Wings were keeping all their players. Fenrir asked to leave, himself. We actually wanted him to stay and talked to him many times. But he felt it was better not to change his mind and to leave. Iceiceice wanted to go back to Singapore so I had to respect his wishes. I think the public is very unfair to him. He was just an offlaner who had to play carry in an emergency on a temporary basis. He was courageous to be willing to take that responsibility; It was a great challenge to him and the last resort for the team. He is the guy who trains the hardest. However badly he played I don't think he should take the blame. I thank and respect him from the bottom of my heart.









Spread your Wings







Wings’ achievements will change our business model. I would disagree that they are a youth team. I've been doing youth teams for too long to know how hard it is for a youth team to achieve anything. Their original team was called SPG. The photo (above) now popular on the Internet was made by me. DK had three people on holiday, but we had games to play. I thought these kids were decent so got them stand in. I still remember after we won, I wrote a note to Zhou, who was casting, asking them to pick MVP among these kids instead of Burning or MMY. It has been over a year since iceice joined them and they are definitely not a youth team. Before TI they beat strong teams, won titles, went out in the first round. They had had all the ups and downs as a team can experience. Their strategies and drafting are all very special and tried. They actually played in a very similar way as DK did. You can say they are an upgrade of DK.



Lastly, I hope EHOME can get better as a team and as a business. Hope they can learn from clubs in and outside China and become the top of the class.





All images courtesy of Imba.TV



Source: http://www.imbatv.cn/special/xinsheng/10/

Translation: Shrinkzxo

Editor: Bluemoon I had always been a coach. There wasn’t management work for me to do. Now I have become the manager again and therefore, I took over the associated work. As a result I can’t say I have much experience at the moment and I don’t think we are that good at doing management work. We just have some stuff to share.I have now had two meetings with the team leader. Awareness was raised that there has to be a captain in every team and we need to have good coordination among team leaders, coaches and captains, in order to will make managers more efficient. I used to be a team leader and a coach. I was very lucky to have DC and 820, who were excellent captains. They are incomparable among hundreds of ppl I led. 820, like DC, started out as an ordinary player that turned into a captain, kind of like passing the torch. So our management style is to create a good captain to ensure him, the team leader, and the coach will form a good managing hierarchy.There is still great distance between domestic (Chinese) and foreign clubs in terms of management skills. Good management consists of discipline and care. You need to know team member’s personal details. You need to know what size of clothes they wear, their height, weight, birthday, physical condition, personal and familial difficulties. You need even to know why they decided to be a pro and their aim. You need to get to the bottom of all this [to be a good manager.]We now developed from one or two teams to eight or nine. We now can no longer rely on people to manage people. They must be managed by rules, which means we need to establish said rules. First of all we set up proper captains, team leaders, who need to manage members by the rules. We need to enforce these rules with strength. Like if somebody forgot to turn off the PC or light then he has to be fined. We need to have a sense to save energy. We need to improve our manners. We have to make them take the team as home.Let me give you an example, two days ago the team leader of our main team was going to wake up the team to train. We start training at 2, so we have to get up around midday. The team leader actually lives in a different house than players, which means he had to come over to do that. But Eleven still didn’t get up after being yelled at. Our team leader had to get him up ten minutes later, to which Eleven said from his bed, “Get up for what?” The team leader stayed in his room for a while and couldn’t do anything, and eventually left. I heard the whole thing. And I was about to drag him up. But I realised this doesn’t solve this problem in the long run. So I emailed LaNm about this incident and asked him to bring it up before training starts. Otherwise the team leader will have too difficult a job. I later went to see their training. When they finished I asked Eleven to come and have a cigarette with me outside. Other players were laughing so hard, but all I wanted to do is have someone to smoke together (no pun intended).Speaking of the captain, he has to have the authority to unite the team – this is a must. But that is far from enough. He also needs to be good at helping teammates to exploit their potential and to know where they can be most effective. This is where LaNm is not very good, even if his authority in the team is absolute.I have observed the dota scene for years. Recently in China, it feels like Xiao8 and rOtk are the only really good captains. No matter how they are mocked, their ability is there. In contrast to foreigners, Chinese players are mostly introverts therefore there are very few good captains. There are a lot of good foreign captains like Misery, Fly, Puppey and Kuroky. A good team requires a good captain. The problem with LaNm is that in big tournaments he’s more preoccupied with improving himself from being 100% to 120%, rather than helping teammates getting from 50% to 70% or 80%. So in comparison he has catch up to do vis-à-vis these mature captains. However, I do feel he is improving.I remember I had a talk with LaNm before TI. I told him that I had a lot of difficulty cooperating with him since he became captain and I listed all of the stuff to him. This is also a thing I talked to him about before Manila; I was much more comfortable cooperating with rOtk. I had more communication with rOtk, he is more positive and his direction is clearer. Also, details need to be sorted out. An individual thought, if kept to itself, is dog shit, no matter how bright the idea is. However, if everyone has the same dog shit in their minds things would be perfect. In that aspect, rOtk is a master.As for a good coach, the standards can be quite varied. Some can do all the work that is required, but others only do the best they can. They are very different. There are also coaches who are inactive and idle. I have a coaching background and coached many teams, so I have a set of style and ideas. But your requirements and tactics for the team should change as the roster changes. When I was at DK I demand the team to be ultra aggressive. But when I copied the same strategy over to EHOME which had Mushi and Inflame, things went horribly wrong. This is when I started rethinking. Patches don’t come into this in any way. It is the fact that your personnel had changed. You have different players with different characteristics. They will have different judgment about what is going on in the game. The new players will also have to digest the strategies you bring to them. When you talked to them about your system they would think they had understood, but once I started to observe them in-game I realized how badly they were doing, so I had to change myself. I had to adjust to the roster and think up some other ideas.There a lot of things a coach can learn from and I am interested in any competitive sport. I will learn from every good coach, like Phil Jackson, who was very good in coaching the Lakers as well as the Bulls. He was apparently very good at managing big-name players. He’s very casual during the regular season but as soon as the play-offs come, everything is instantly upgraded. You would see the effect of every timeout and the improvement in the quality of defense and the attack system in the playoffs. And every key turn is dealt with smoothly. This is the quality of a good coach. He has total control over the team’s energies. He knows when to preserve team’s strength and when to release it. He also has all the timing in releasing the energy. You also have Mourinho, who evokes very extreme emotions. Both his critics and supporters would acknowledge his flamboyance, but very few people know that he is flamboyant to divert pressure on his players and media attention. Lippi, who coached Guangzhou Evergrande - I read a bit his memoir and he had similar sentiment. Marbury, or Commissar Ma as we call him here, talked and was interviewed after helping Beijing Ducks to win CBA Championship. His words were very insightful, nutritious, demanding and responsible. Every coach and captain can learn from him.I have been an esports coach for a long time, but the period I remember the most is when I was a CS coach, when we were under really difficult circumstances — we had to pay to play on LAN, in an overseas tournament. For players in that time, being able to play overseas is unequally prestigious as international tournaments were fewer as well. We didn’t have any sponsorship — even the team name was given by myself — teAmart. In 2005 we trained in an abandoned private primary school, where we were the only people there. We had to take an unlicensed taxi for forty minutes after walking half an hour on the mountain to get to the training facility. After ten hours we go through the same way to get back. We couldn’t always get water at home to take showers, so often we have to go the well in pairs of two to take shower in front of local peasants and their ox. It was quite sad and cold, but it was fun as well. It was also the foundation of our friendship and we would definitely do it again if given the chance. But today’s player absolutely wouldn’t do this. They want kill the team leader just bc there is no fruit in the training room or are forced to showering next to a moonwell? Also, how much streaming time will it waste? They all want that money.As for my most memorable Dota experience, it would have be 2010, but not for the ten titles we won. In WCG Beijing Qualifier, Zhou and dgc’s team came to try to snatch the qualification, and they named us to ‘snipe the strongest team’. We started the tournament by exchanging trash talk and each team bet 5000 rmb against the other. I contributed 2500 and the team gave the rest. I remember when we met in the upper bracket we got stomped badly — back then, we played face to face. Their mid was taunting as they were winning, having said quite a lot insensitive things towards me. I did not mind much but the players thought they lost a lot of face, being very dispirited when we had dinner. I was going to pay the bill but Zhou Yang (KingJ) and Co. wouldn’t let me, saying we must get everything back. Though having said that, I wasn’t actually sure about how things would actually turn out. The story after that is now known to everybody. That qualifier win is particularly important as it established our confidence and friendship. It also gave us the belief not to give up when we were behind in game. Building on that, we made very fast progress and everything was made easy. I could criticise players without reservation — sometimes 820 would start it even before I do. Nowadays you have to think about saving players’ face, which is tiring.As for EHOME after 2015, I’d say we’ve had peaks and valleys. The peak was at the end of last year, when all other teams were not very strong while LaNm was gaining some understanding of the patch. I remember it as we won R & D Cup, MDL, and SDO back to back to back. Both our form and momentum were great, but I knew the victory would be ephemeral. We talked before that CTY actually likes to farm a lot and that patch’s tempo was very well-suited for him. Kaka’s Earth Spirit, Eleven’s Void and Lone Druid were all very good. Our opponents couldn’t ban all our heroes, so it was normal that we won things. After the new year, there was a new patch and we took a break, so the slump in results was actually expected. The most difficult time for us was probably TI6. Eleven’s grandfather was ill, so we moved Fan to the main squad. Unfortunately, the chemistry that resulted was not good. In the scrims we had with our opponents in the qualifier, we had six teams with whom we had a win-rate less than 60%. After some calculations, I concluded that our chance to win the qualifier is less than 3%, which meant we couldn’t even make it past the qualifier and would have to watch TI at home. This would be a serious problem.The team was really depressed and the mood was really down, so we had to make to a decision to change things. We had to let Eleven have somebody else look after his grandpa, get him back, and have iceiceiceto play the carry, which we did not think would solve the problem. We played together for a couple of days until it was the qualifier, in which we definitely lived dangerously — to be honest our team is kind of interesting, we can usually surprise people when everyone is talking us down. But when the comeback was hitting its stride we would start tanking, including this TI. Countless people said we were chasing after the title, which made me almost blush. Not even to mention the bans, if you had a look at our pick stats you would see the number. We did not look like a top team at all. It is true that we shouldn't have lost the first game against EG — the game we lost after getting megas — which a lot of people say was epic. I would say it was dog shit. EG were garbage and we were even more garbage. I don't know where the epic is. We were very timid, our teamplay did not show much sign of progress. We were just playing with our cards shown, which is the surest way to lose. As for Wings, their title win is credible. Their strategy and line-ups are both well-bodied and rich to the point that you can't prepare for them. They were also extremely relaxed. They played TI like pubs. Their Championship was well-deserved.I think the transfers in this window are all very mediocre for Chinese teams. The team that did very well in terms of signings was EG, who will definitely be a strong team. VG is one of those Chinese teams who has done better, others are kind of lackluster. In the beginning we wanted Maybe as our Carry, but he told us he wanted to go to VG.P more. Sylar actually came to us and we thought he was decent. We thought about having ChuaN as our position 4, who would make a decent support duo with LaNm, but our negotiations fell through. Then we heard about the rumour that Wings might disband because faith_bian was going to University in a foreign country (U.S. possibly). I therefore was thinking having iceice and Fenrir as our supports and have LaNm as coach, only to discover Wings were keeping all their players. Fenrir asked to leave, himself. We actually wanted him to stay and talked to him many times. But he felt it was better not to change his mind and to leave. Iceiceice wanted to go back to Singapore so I had to respect his wishes. I think the public is very unfair to him. He was just an offlaner who had to play carry in an emergency on a temporary basis. He was courageous to be willing to take that responsibility; It was a great challenge to him and the last resort for the team. He is the guy who trains the hardest. However badly he played I don't think he should take the blame. I thank and respect him from the bottom of my heart.Wings’ achievements will change our business model. I would disagree that they are a youth team. I've been doing youth teams for too long to know how hard it is for a youth team to achieve anything. Their original team was called SPG. The photo (above) now popular on the Internet was made by me. DK had three people on holiday, but we had games to play. I thought these kids were decent so got them stand in. I still remember after we won, I wrote a note to Zhou, who was casting, asking them to pick MVP among these kids instead of Burning or MMY. It has been over a year since iceice joined them and they are definitely not a youth team. Before TI they beat strong teams, won titles, went out in the first round. They had had all the ups and downs as a team can experience. Their strategies and drafting are all very special and tried. They actually played in a very similar way as DK did. You can say they are an upgrade of DK.Lastly, I hope EHOME can get better as a team and as a business. Hope they can learn from clubs in and outside China and become the top of the class. Translator https://twitter.com/shrinkzxo