Advanced (Contains some subjective bits)

How to actually use this knowledge

Also

Let me reiterate

While I see reliable gold stacked the most on Chinese carries, I personally find it to be the most important on supports, who have to sacrifice themselves more.I see supports that could probably find themselves with 50% higher net worth at the end of the game if they had managed their reliable gold better.What this means is, if you look at the end game stats on say dotabuff, you might see in a 45 minute game that a position 5 support had earned 10k gold. Yet, they only had about 5k of items. Where did that 5k go? Well consumables is part of it, yeah. But 45 minutes of buying wards off cooldown is a mere 900 gold. Where is that 4100 left? Well there is smokes, and consumables. Alright, still, we have about 3k of gold missing on this theoretical player. That's gold that was spent inefficiently and lost on death. 10 deaths can mean about 3000 gold lost over a match.As a support, if you just try to always make sure you don't spend below your reliable gold, especially when you are winning, except when you're about to die, you can find that gold slowly building up and never being lost, and still having 2k+ gold with nothing lost when you sacrifice yourself in a fight.Always remember to put items in your quick-buy. You do this by opening the shop and pressing shift+click on an item.Then you can click the items in the quick buy menu to buy them.You should also bind a key to "purchase quickbuy". I use "n". "b" is another good key. This is also why I don't recommend putting shop on "b" or something like a lot of players do. "quickbuy" is the key you need to press in a hurry on your left hand, not opening shop.You need to keep a mental note of how much reliable gold you have, by hovering over your gold. When you practice more, you will likely develop a mental memory of about how much you probably have due to kills/assists/objectives without having to continously glance at it.When you're about to die, quickbuy or buy a bunch of consumables (TP, smokes, etc).you can buy things BEFORE you fight just to be safe, if you're not comfortable with your ability to buy just before dying. Why does this help? If you get kills in that fight, it's just adding more reliable gold that won't be subtracted from. If a fight lasts 20 seconds, you will only lose 25 of that unreliable passive gold you gained since buying last, assuming your AoEs don't kill creeps after buying and before dying.In short: Only buy items when you need really need to buy them and with mostly your unreliable gold. Only spend portions of your reliable gold when you're about to die, or to get an item is going to win you the game(blink, etc), and of course on buyback.6 towers and a Roshan is 1928 reliable gold. The assists for a support would usually be ranging from 30-210 reliable gold each kill. A role5 that has managed their reliable gold well, just buying wards, smokes, and tps with their unreliable gold, can suddenly find themselves able to almost buy a sheepstick even if they were competing for the Maelk award.: This should not get in the way of normal ward/smoke buying. You have 75 passive gold. 2 minutes of passive gold is enough to buy wards, out of their 6 minute cooldown. Your passive gold is 3x what you need for wards.The other 4 minutes is enough for your other consumables like smoke, salves, clarities, TPs, and sentries.You absolutely should not need to spend reliable gold on those items. You should only need to because you made a mistake in not spending gold before you died.