How to Watch Pro Dota: TI Strategy So Far August 11th, 2016 14:52 GMT Text by Ver Graphics by Nixer IntroductionThe WinnersThe LosersRecommended GameFinal BracketCreditsFocus Mode



A lot of amazing plays, strategies, and fails happen in a Dota match that won’t get spoken about, whether during the cast or afterwards on panels or forums: there’s just simply too much to cover, and too many different audiences to pander to. The game is incredibly deep, and a lot of really cool aspects won’t get spotted unless you are specifically looking for them. Hopefully this article will help you be aware of certain useful patterns to pay attention to, and certain frequent traps to be avoided. If you can make use of them, they might enrich your TI6 and deepen your appreciation for the game. After explaining these patterns and areas to focus on, I’ll then illustrate how they can be applied by going over TI6 group stage strategy.

Common Patterns To Focus On There’s far too many variables in Dota to pay attention to them all. The most important skill in viewing is being able to figure out the most important ones to focus on, and then ignore the rest. One common mistake I see people make when analyzing games is simply focusing on unimportant details, while not being aware of the factors that shape games.



The key skill to understand what is going on is second-order thinking. That means you cannot take events that happen at face value. Just work through it logically: teams are playing to win, they understand how their own lineup works, and how the enemy lineup works. Thus they can identify the asymmetrical situations that they will perform best in, and try to create those. That’s all Dota is. But you have to account for the fact that the enemy knows that too, and how they will try to do the same for themselves. That’s what makes it hard.

What Does Each Team See? Let’s start with the most fundamental point: Dota is a game of imperfect information. Pros are extremely good at instantly reading situations. When they have all the information, such as both teams sitting in a creep-filled lane in daylight, they will automatically understand who has the advantage if a fight breaks out in x, y, or z ways, and because the disadvantaged team will see this and know it, they will retreat and position themselves to make sure they don’t get in that situation. Thus almost all won fights in Dota derive from a surprise from the fog, or an additional hidden element one team couldn’t initially see or judge properly. Because if they could judge it properly, the situation would never occur in the first place. That means you have to pay attention to what each team sees. Let’s take a look at an example from LGD and OG:





What is happening here? Superficially, LGD is pushing bottom, while smoking part of their team to prevent OG from correctly judging the right initiation decision (note that it is daytime, so the smoke hides more than it would in the nighttime. Teams will see empty ground and believe it is empty ground, when in actuality a hero could be there smoked in plain sight). OG smokes on LGD in turn, a fight breaks out, and OG kind of wins, but because of rubberband it’s mostly a draw. There’s a lot more to it though, as one should expect from two teams with such brilliant captains.



The key aspect to pay attention to here is Notail farming middle without a TP in his inventory while his team smokes on LGD from the rear. LGD sees Notail with no TP, thus they know he cannot effectively intervene in bottom in time as it will take him 15+ seconds to run over, and they relax their position and spread out a little bit to ward and guard against a smoke from the left side, which Notail could join in time. This gives OG an advantage in position: they can simultaneously jump LGD’s critical defensive support, MMY’s Shadow Demon, and one of LGD’s important heroes, Maybe’s Juggernaut, before LGD can react. This positional and surprise advantage negates OG starting the fight initially 4v5, since by the time LGD can react, it is 4v3, soon to be 5v3, and with 3 heroes LGD will lack the damage to reduce OG’s numbers fast enough.





That was the plan, one of those plans that make you think: damn OG has really clever strategic and tactical thinking. In the execution, though OG’s supports failed, a rare occurrence. This should have been a very good fight for OG because of their slick misinformation and smoke movement, but they didn’t properly focus MMY, who though was lasso’d and should have died during it, got off a critical disruption on Maybe during the duel, which changed an assured Maybe death to duel+Sun Ray to Maybe living and Miracle dying instead, since Cr1t didn’t stun MMY after the lasso ended, and Fly chose to Supernova nothing instead of using Sun Ray on Maybe first.



This ties into another common pattern of perception: support mistakes of omission or disable mistiming rarely get noticed, even though they are often the most critical part of a teamfight. When you look at this battle, you need to be aware enough to question why Maybe got disrupted mid-duel, which saved his life, and OG didn’t do the damage they should have been able to. If OG is initiating with total surprise on MMY, why should he be able to get off a disruption if his team is too far to help him? Those were the key questions of this fight, and everything else is secondary.



Continuing the discussion of vision, map maneuvering and setting up fights is arguably the most critical skill of the game nowadays. If you want to understand what is really going on at a deeper level, you have to consciously focus on what each team can see and think about the enemy team will react to this information, and thus how the first team will use this known information to set up advantageous scenarios. The fact that we observe the game with a maphack does us a real disservice, because we will innately not focus on what each team sees and doesn’t see. And unless you make that a primary focus, you won’t understand why teams do what they do, because you aren’t actually seeing it from their perspective.

Tradeoffs Dota is a game of tradeoffs. You can’t have everything at once, but you can have something, even if you are massively behind. If you want to know how a game develops as it does, you need to be aware of the tradeoffs each team are making and how they stack up. That means you need to have some idea of what other options are.



This can get very complex very fast, so let’s narrow it down and focus on two of the chief tradeoffs teams will make every game: Farm Distribution and risk. How do teams distribute their available resources? Which heroes get the safe farming areas, such as the hard camps near mid-lane, or the ancients when surrounded by their team? Who gets delegated to farm the riskier areas? Does a team take risks farming, by sending a hero to solo farm a lane with the enemy initiators and one or more damage dealers off the map? When the enemy team has 3 or more heroes off the map, how many heroes will a team split up to farm at once? How far apart will they move?



One of the most poignant examples so far is OG vs Wings, game 1. Wings sported a low-damage lineup with monstrous amounts of Antimage hatred: Chrono, Doom, adaptive strike, Tornado, Deafening Blast, Glimpse, and Static Storm all made life a living hell for Miracle. But Wings itemized for this at the cost of doing very little damage to a spread out OG. Arguably the most telling decision in the game didn’t happen in a teamfight but during the periods of quiet farming.



Notice how Notail (Death Prophet, Orange), only gets a tiny portion of the safe farm on the map, while Miracle (Antimage, Purple), gobbles it all up.



Thus OG ended up in a bad situation where all of their farm was on Miracle, the one hero who Wings had all the answers for. This was compounded by the fact that Miracle didn’t play very well, and itemized very poorly, only getting a BKB late in the game after losing half a dozen fights to Invoker disables and adaptive strikes. Unfortunately for OG, his linken’s did very little.



It’s easy to analyze this game and blame Notail, and he did have some inefficient map movements, but the farm distribution was a team decision overall, and OG invested an enormous amount in Miracle that didn’t pay off. Miracle was farming his 8th and 9th slot items when Notail couldn’t even get his 4th slot filled. Maybe OG’s approach could’ve worked if Miracle had played and itemized at the level



One last trend you may have spotted, compared to TI5, is the downfall of the farmed supports. At TI5 it was common to see Aui, Puppey, DDC, MMY, or Q solo pushing out sidelanes in risky areas instead of huddling behind their carry as heroes like Dazzle or Winter Wyvern. These players would routinely get 100-120 creeps by 40 minutes. This is not the case at TI6, where 70-80 creeps at 40 minutes is a pretty farmed support.. Sometimes when teams run a jungler, a support Mirana, or a low-farm offlaner like Nyx, the supports can take up some of the empty space given from Nyx’s map dominance. But often you will simply see 2-3 heroes covering the two main cores, with the remainder of farm going to the offlaner. That shows a trade-off of teams playing safer, taking less risks in their farming stances, and giving priority to the cores above all else.

Focus And Area Control In Teamfights At the highest level of play, teamfights are characterized by two major aspects: coordinated burst [and saves], and controlling areas of the battlefield. Since 5v5 teamfights dominate the current strategy, it’s necessary to pay attention to how teams attempt to control the battlefield if you want to understand why certain teams repeatedly win fights.





Wings makes a tough judgment call early on - to contest DC outside their tower. At this point DC is ahead in fighting power, with Axe also having an aegis. After a support gets X’d, Moo jumps in, intending to set up a dive for his team to followup on. Yet Wings don’t let DC follow through on this plan: first Innocence lifts Moo before the call goes off with lightning reflexes, throwing him out of the way.



Then, most critically, Faith Bian and Blink choose not to help their 3 teammates kill the Axe, but instead zone out the rest of DC, trusting their teammates to handle the now isolated Axe. Then, once the aegis is triggered, 2 Wings heroes that killed the aegis move up to help their buddies, quickly gunning down Misery and W33, while Innocence prevents Axe from assisting. At multiple points this fight the Wings players instantly decided how to best distribute their heroes, and trusted each other to make the right movements. As a result, DC’s heroes couldn’t properly focus, while Wings could first stall the team and overwhelm Axe, then stall Axe and overwhelm the team.





In the deciding fight of the epic LGD/Secret game, LGD managed to create the ideal teamfight that they had failed to do the entire game. The fight begins with a roar onto Xiao8, who is saved at low hp. The natural play for Secret here, given their near-parity in farm to LGD, is to overwhelm LGD before Xiao8 gets healed back up and Secret is left with roar on cooldown and nothing to show for it. Thus EternalEnvy charges out after LGD and BKB’s, expecting immediate backup. Yet as soon as Envy and Arteezy start to move forward, Maybe blinks in on Secret’s backline, cutting them (SD, VS, BM) off from their two cores. This looks so simple and is so easy to miss, yet it's these kind of plays that make Maybe the best in the world.



A good Lotus Orb by PLD saved the team from Omnislash, but this uses up the valuable 5 seconds of EE’s BKB. Arteezy make a tough choice to help his team instead of Envy, but right as they are about to deliver the coup de grace to Maybe, MMY blinks in and hits a 4 man curse, allowing Maybe to escape.



While Maybe and MMY are keeping the other 4 Secret heroes at bay, Xiao8, Agressif, and Banana are kiting and killing EternalEnvy outside the base, who is denied the backup he desperately needed and should have had. As his BKB charge ended, Envy looked back for his teammates only to see them zoned off from him.



This is one of those fights where nobody did anything wrong: Secret made the expected move and LGD made great plays in response. The sheer speed at which it happened blindsided Secret and prevented them from reacting as a cohesive unit. As in the Wings example, LGD accurately assessed the proper distribution of their heroes: they were able to use 2 heroes to cut off 4 of Secret’s, while cleanly killing EE in a 3v1.

Draft Analyzing drafts is an amazingly complex thing, but many love talking about it. Unless you are a top pro, you probably can’t do it well at all. But who says you have to analyze a draft totally? Why not just focus on a couple key points to avoid getting lost in a deluge of details? Let’s take a look at the Wings/EG game as an example. What’s most important to focus on here? I’d limit it to three variables to start with.





Damage



Initiation



Assaulting and defending high ground

These factors then let you reason out #4:



These factors then let you reason out #4: The ideal fight for each team

I always start with how teams will do damage. Is their damage bursty or over time? Is it single target or aoe? How many heroes can effectively deal damage? How many heroes can effectively deal damage when enemy bkb’s are up?



The characteristic of how a team deals damage determine how they will set up their fights. But you can’t compare it in a vacuum, as you have to take into account how the enemy team will try to deal damage and prevent damage.



In this case, both Wings and EG do mostly single target damage, with the exception of Slark’s cleave from empower during RP. Wing’s damage past 20 minutes is limited solely to the empowered Slark, while their advantage is that they have multiple ways to initiate, drag EG’s heroes way out of position with hook and lasso, and prevent the rest of that hero’s friends from helping with Mag and Rubick.



Wings controls the map by threat of mass initiation at multiple points, forcing EG to stay tightly grouped, since even if Bat and Bat are showing in a lane, Pudge, Slark, and Rubick can easily gank multiple heroes out of position simultaneously. EG on the other hand can’t initiate for beans, but they can still control the map with Nightstalker’s vision advantage, which will narrow Wing’s pickoff and farming opportunities plus giving EG advance warning against any blink initiations.





The less initiation or teamfight initiation a team has, the more important the initiation it has. A carry void, as a solo initiator in a tri-core lineup, is under a lot of pressure and is less likely to produce a good chrono than an offlane void who also has a blink Lion that can initiate. The more sources of initiation you have, the better each one becomes, since there is more the enemy has to account for. In the above example, if there was no Bat, Rubick, or Pudge, EG would be very acutely aware of the danger of the RP. But because EG’s crucial hero (Huskar) gets pummeled and the hero that is supposed to save him (Wisp) is picked off first due to awful positioning, EG has no choice but to make a headlong dash to save Sumail, which sets up an easy RP.



You’ll see this happen a lot with lower level players who will brag about getting a 4 man ravage or big Impale. But they are focusing on the wrong point - the issue is not how many people they catch in their stun. The stun is only a means to the desired end: killing people. So oftentimes a 2 man ravage where the carries can hit the stunned enemies without interruption is better than a 4 man ravage where your team isn’t ready to attack during the stun.



In this case, Blink’s Batrider held Sumail’s Huskar in place for Slark to beat on. Sumail died too quickly because Zai’s bad Wisp positioning let Shadow simply kill him to start with under a sentry. Meanwhile, Faith_bian’s RP prevented EG’s heroes from interfering while Slark beat down a disabled Huskar, and while he avoided the RP, Fear arrived too late to do anything since EG hadn’t been tightly grouped to start.



Wings would later lose fights and the game due to Shadow getting focused early on, or his teammates unable to create the ideal scenario of “Shadow beats on out of position, disabled targets one-by-one,” while EG was able to move fast enough to create fights where they could simply out-trade and out-last Wings in the straight up manfights that their lineup excelled at.





TI6 Group Stage Strategy Finally, let’s take an overall look of the strategic paradigms that dominated the group stage. Right now the two most important points teams are focusing on are:



Defending and breaking high ground

Having the right initiation against enemy heroes that forces them to 5 man more often than they’d like.



You may have noticed that this TI has had the most upsets since, well, ever. There’s a lot of reasons for this. But the primary reason for this is the meta. Just like the Frankfurt Major Meta, the TI6 groups has a strategic landscape dominated by a few different scenarios that almost require hard counters to compete or avoid a situation where one must outplay the opponent massively. The ability for teams to outplay each other is less than ever, and in its place, luck and very polarizing strategies heavily influence the outcome of games.



TI6 is currently dominated by two opposing forces: the incredible ability of teams to turtle with lategame illusion armies or Elder Titan, versus the ability to end games very early, before key items are obtained. Against turtling teams, one has to not only get a big lead early, but have the right tools and safe execution for breaching high-ground for low risk. Or they can attempt to break the base well before the turtling team can get online with a Drow or Huskar based lineup. Against these early pushes, rubberband scarcely matters because the defending team often doesn’t have the critical items and levels to stop the push anyway.

Offending Heroes

VS.

VS.

Simply put, it is very difficult to hold the base early on against these Huskar/Oracle, or Huskar/Wisp lineups. Many games are simply lost in the draft phase, or simply because a team made one or two mistakes early on. Against these Huskar and/or Drow lineups, teams often just end up in a situation where the Huskar and Drow are untouchable, because nobody can trade against them effectively or sit in the front, like a Dragon Knight could. Meanwhile, the other 4 heroes can sit well out of initiation range, confident nobody can burst down the Huskar or kill Drow without overcommitting and dying.





MVP are just forced to watch their base die, because they can’t possibly engage with Newbee’s fragile heroes all out of reach.



You can attempt to fight these lineups by daring wrap-around smokes like Wings against OG, catching the critical Oracle from behind. You can also attempt to pack enough wave-clear, spam, and initiation threat like Elder Titan or Batrider like Fnatic used against VG.R. You can put significant pressure on the Drow itself, but that often sacrifices other lanes due to Drow aura. The best way is to combat the deathball on the map by aggressively pushing lanes, forcing their heroes to split up, and pouncing on them individually as Wings did against Navi. But this poses a grave risk, as Wing’s found out: all of their excellent pickoffs were completely negated by one good smoke and teamfight from Navi, leading to a highground siege they couldn’t hold.





Pay special attention to how Blink’s TA (teal) got tracked, then moved left to the ancients, making Dendi feel safer to for the rune, where he was ambushed before even reaching it.



Yet these somewhat allin push strats are a symptom of a larger problem: how to close out games. Given the ability of heroes like Morphling, Naga, or Terrorblade to keep sidelanes pushed out at very little risk, teams that get locked in their base still can keep up in farm, as TNC’s Alchemist/Terrorblade did against LGD.



What’s worse, the presence of Elder Titan and/or Shadow Demon illusion spam makes it near-impossible to safely breach the base. LGD consistently outplayed TNC on the map, but once LGD gave up a couple kills to some rng smokes, they couldn’t outfight the illusion spam and acid spray from Shadow Demon, Terrorblade, and Alchemist. Even though TNC gave up most of the map, LGD couldn’t force the issue effectively and eventually lost. Secret tried to repeat this achievement against LGD, but eventually got outplayed enough times that they collapsed. Yet both these examples are striking cases where a team that got outplayed for the majority of the game could still hang on and mount comebacks by some very easy and brainless play.





Ehome needed a 50k lead to close out Secret who was forced to 5 man from minute 15. This is why



It is this area that Ehome has shined the most. They have been the most innovative in creating better ways to crack highground. Lanm, possibly the support of the tournament so far, has excelled on a Kunkka who not only can make plays all game, but also give his team risk-free highground attempts. It isn’t foolproof, as the above example showed, but it is the best ray of hope. Along with the Kunkka, Ehome has also sported Wing’s Shadow Demon+Luna combo to safely break base with mass glaive illusions. Accordingly, while other teams have dropped loads of won games due to highground failures, Ehome has limited this to one meek loss against DC.



As I outlined in a





The problem is that it is not just breaching highground that is an issue. When a team has little of the map to cover due to turtling, and the dominant team needs to farm large portions of the map to increase their lead, that opens up opportunities for RNG smokes by the turtling team. All they need is to get one pick, and not only does the map open up, but they get a very large amount of gold and xp back.





The second element that teams are focusing heavily on is vision and movement. Simply put, the heavy cost of rubberband deaths force teams to minimize needless dying whenever possible. That means moving as 5 when the enemy could be making an aggressive move, so they don’t give away deaths for nothing. The tradeoff for moving as 5 is that you don’t push out waves as well and farm less overall, making aggressive movements harder. Yet when faced with uncertain enemy movements, almost all teams [except Wings] opt for safe clumped play, because the math makes a decent % chance of a cheap death nowhere near worth the value in farming a few extra creep camps.



But, pros will try to gain every advantage they can, and the current means of doing that is by “cheating” and not moving as 5 when the key enemy heroes are off the map. Many players will try to play the odds and hope they or their team don’t get caught by the full enemy team when not together. Accordingly, many teams are optimizing their drafts to account for this possibility of farming more than is safe, by controlling vision, movement, and burst to rapidly punish offenders with heroes like Axe, Mirana, Night Stalker, Riki, Kunkka, Disruptor, Timber, Beast Master, Kotl, and even Wing’s Centaur Warrunner.





The primary deciding factor for MVP’s surprise victory over OG was that OG continuously tried to take more than they safely could from the map, and MVP punished them with some very incisive ganks. In the deciding play of game 1, OG is in a very strong position, but instead of pushing as 5, or defending as 5, Miracle decides he can safely farm his t3 tower alone. In a daring move, MVP waited outside at top with all 5 heroes to jump Miracle in his base. Given the fact that the creep wave was already at OG’s base, this single death lead to a total rout and quick MVP victory. Not one to be daunted by failure, Miracle tried to get away with the exact same thing in game 3.





In the first example, part of OG farms top while 4 MVP heroes push middle. Miracle thinks it is safe to farm alone bottom under his tower with 4 heroes showing middle. However, he makes the critical mistake of lasering a creep, leaving him open to getting jumped by QO. As soon as this laser happens, QO calls over his team from mid, and this results in a running fight that begins with Miracle dead and chrono expended. Had OG fought this with all 3 heroes behind Miracle to start with, MVP could’ve never pulled it off (or even 2 heroes behind, with a 3rd ready to TP).



In the second example, Notail attempts to farm the ancients, while his team is spread all over the place. OG’s major tactical flaw in this game 3 was the supports not giving Notail enough cover, especially after they ill-advisedly forced fights early on in mid-lane and got him killed. In this case, had OG been waiting behind Notail, with Miracle ready to TP, they could have either punished or dissuaded MVP from ganking, and secured Notail some badly needed farm. Instead Notail dies, and OG gave up more control.



As the tournament continues, pay close attention to how closely together teams are playing when their foes are missing, and how often teams and certain players will choose to split up (like OG or DC) or stay together (like LGD). It’s also important to assess the teams best at punishing this (Wings, Ehome, MVP) and watch how they draft and move to best put themselves in situations where they can get a pick off.

Don't Fall for the Simple Narrative It’s human nature to prefer a simple explanation, even an incomplete or inaccurate one, to a complex explanation. Unfortunately in Dota, things are rarely simple, and even accurate statements often contain numerous unspoken assumptions that a pro will know and others will not. Yet you will still be given simple narratives that attempt to explain complex scenarios, which unfortunately have gaping holes. Here’s a few examples out of a great many that show how easy it is to fall for an oversimplified scenario.



We’ve just been sold a tale that apparently it was just EE and bad drafting that held Secret back in their loss against LGD, despite the valiant effort and amazing play of Pieliedie and Arteezy that kept them in the game. This of course sounds nice and agreeable if you like these players, but it is far too inaccurate of a picture. In order to come to that conclusion you have to conveniently ignore the fact that Arteezy not only lost his lane so hard he had to retreat into the jungle by 2.5 minutes, but also that Arteezy fed at top and bottom later on in very dubious positions on Alchemist, the one hero you can’t carelessly die on. Nor can pieliedie be effusively praise unless you cover your eyes to the fact that he made no impact in the laning phase, and was rarely at the point of conflict early. Nor can drafting serve as a valid excuse unless you forget that the exact SD, Alch, and TB combo was one that a much weaker TNC beat LGD with. And finally you have to ignore that LGD are simply amazing players who played an overall great game. Even in the case of Envy, a real assessment would take into account that EE didn't die the first 40 minutes of the game, during the point when he was most vulnerable because his team failed.





Bulba took a decent portion of the blame in the Secret loss, though his lesser popularity meant he was spared more of the blame. Some of it was probably deserved, but sometimes favorite players can’t make the game-winning moves because of bad luck or they just outplayed. Here is a critical moment in the Secret LGD game where LGD dives the base, gets a pick, and attempts to flee. Bulba’s Beastmaster respawns, blinks into the middle, ready to roar Agressif’s Ember Spirit, whose linkens is broken. Then, in mid-cast animation, Agressif sees Bulba and instantly sleights, delaying the roar by a second. Once the sleight ends, Bulba is ready to roar and raises his arms in cast animation, but then gets Winter’s Cursed by MMY before the animation is able to complete.. Had Agressif and MMY not reacted instantaneously like this, LGD likely would’ve gotten wiped with EE respawning and tp’ing in. These were just small parts of a major fight, but these critical details played a massive role in the outcome. Sometimes a loss in Dota isn’t always about who to blame: there’s likely going to be a lot more to it than that.



You will be sold how Miracle 1v9’d many a game, whether a win or loss. This is simple, and it sounds nice, and people will agree with it without thinking because Miracle is flashy, he’s young, and he plays for a western team. But this will ignore how his teammates all suffered to make him look good, and



You will be sold that Arteezy and Miracle are in a different category of player because they are 9k mmr. Some will take this as the meme it is, but most will take it unthinking at face value ignoring how they only could accomplish this on the heavily mmr-inflated Euro server, or that Illidan Stormrage, who was just a handful of points away from 9k on Europe himself, wasn’t the worst carry at TI5. Or that if you take this argument to its logical conclusion, you end up suggesting that Kaka (8550 china mmr) is a much better player than Chuan (6700 china mmr), which is of course ludicrous (both are amazing and near-equals).





You will be sold how Wings.Shadow is awesome for getting a rampage against EG since that is obvious and easy to focus on, while ignoring what made it possible for his team to start the ideal fight that let him get all those kills: Innocence and Blink for farming and cutting the top waves right before the smoke and deceiving EG into spreading out to farm more camps at bottom, Shadow’s team for covering him mid and letting him push out the wave safely, the very fast smoke timing after these two farming instances, the approach angle that let them arrive when EG hadn’t grouped together tightly yet, and a good deal of simply luck.



Beware the simple explanation, because it hides so many unspoken assumptions and logical continuations that may very well be false. And once you can see beyond the superficialities, enjoy the rich strategy that shapes the game.

Do you ever wish you knew why Dota games play out as they do? Did you notice that there is more to the game than simply a bunch of clashes interspersed by periods of farming, and moments when you are told to cheer? Have you thought you understood what was happening but had nagging doubts that there was more to it?A lot of amazing plays, strategies, and fails happen in a Dota match that won’t get spoken about, whether during the cast or afterwards on panels or forums: there’s just simply too much to cover, and too many different audiences to pander to. The game is incredibly deep, and a lot of really cool aspects won’t get spotted unless you are specifically looking for them. Hopefully this article will help you be aware of certain useful patterns to pay attention to, and certain frequent traps to be avoided. If you can make use of them, they might enrich your TI6 and deepen your appreciation for the game. After explaining these patterns and areas to focus on, I’ll then illustrate how they can be applied by going over TI6 group stage strategy.There’s far too many variables in Dota to pay attention to them all. The most important skill in viewing is being able to figure out the most important ones to focus on, and then ignore the rest. One common mistake I see people make when analyzing games is simply focusing on unimportant details, while not being aware of the factors that shape games.The key skill to understand what is going on is second-order thinking. That means you cannot take events that happen at face value. Just work through it logically: teams are playing to win, they understand how their own lineup works, and how the enemy lineup works. Thus they can identify the asymmetrical situations that they will perform best in, and try to create those. That’s all Dota is. But you have to account for the fact that the enemy knows that too, and how they will try to do the same for themselves. That’s what makes it hard.Let’s start with the most fundamental point: Dota is a game of imperfect information. Pros are extremely good at instantly reading situations. When they have all the information, such as both teams sitting in a creep-filled lane in daylight, they will automatically understand who has the advantage if a fight breaks out in x, y, or z ways, and because the disadvantaged team will see this and know it, they will retreat and position themselves to make sure they don’t get in that situation. Thus almost all won fights in Dota derive from a surprise from the fog, or an additional hidden element one team couldn’t initially see or judge properly. Because if they could judge it properly, the situation would never occur in the first place. That means you have to pay attention to what each team sees. Let’s take a look at an example from LGD and OG:What is happening here? Superficially, LGD is pushing bottom, while smoking part of their team to prevent OG from correctly judging the right initiation decision (note that it is daytime, so the smoke hides more than it would in the nighttime. Teams will see empty ground and believe it is empty ground, when in actuality a hero could be there smoked in plain sight). OG smokes on LGD in turn, a fight breaks out, and OG kind of wins, but because of rubberband it’s mostly a draw. There’s a lot more to it though, as one should expect from two teams with such brilliant captains.The key aspect to pay attention to here is Notail farming middle without a TP in his inventory while his team smokes on LGD from the rear. LGD sees Notail with no TP, thus they know he cannot effectively intervene in bottom in time as it will take him 15+ seconds to run over, and they relax their position and spread out a little bit to ward and guard against a smoke from the left side, which Notail could join in time. This gives OG an advantage in position: they can simultaneously jump LGD’s critical defensive support, MMY’s Shadow Demon, and one of LGD’s important heroes, Maybe’s Juggernaut, before LGD can react. This positional and surprise advantage negates OG starting the fight initially 4v5, since by the time LGD can react, it is 4v3, soon to be 5v3, and with 3 heroes LGD will lack the damage to reduce OG’s numbers fast enough.That was the plan, one of those plans that make you think: damn OG has really clever strategic and tactical thinking. In the execution, though OG’s supports failed, a rare occurrence. This should have been a very good fight for OG because of their slick misinformation and smoke movement, but they didn’t properly focus MMY, who though was lasso’d and should have died during it, got off a critical disruption on Maybe during the duel, which changed an assured Maybe death to duel+Sun Ray to Maybe living and Miracle dying instead, since Cr1t didn’t stun MMY after the lasso ended, and Fly chose to Supernova nothing instead of using Sun Ray on Maybe first.This ties into another common pattern of perception: support mistakes of omission or disable mistiming rarely get noticed, even though they are often the most critical part of a teamfight. When you look at this battle, you need to be aware enough to question why Maybe got disrupted mid-duel, which saved his life, and OG didn’t do the damage they should have been able to. If OG is initiating with total surprise on MMY, why should he be able to get off a disruption if his team is too far to help him? Those were the key questions of this fight, and everything else is secondary.Continuing the discussion of vision, map maneuvering and setting up fights is arguably the most critical skill of the game nowadays. If you want to understand what is really going on at a deeper level, you have to consciously focus on what each team can see and think about the enemy team will react to this information, and thus how the first team will use this known information to set up advantageous scenarios. The fact that we observe the game with a maphack does us a real disservice, because we will innately not focus on what each team sees and doesn’t see. And unless you make that a primary focus, you won’t understand why teams do what they do, because you aren’t actually seeing it from their perspective.Dota is a game of tradeoffs. You can’t have everything at once, but you can have something, even if you are massively behind. If you want to know how a game develops as it does, you need to be aware of the tradeoffs each team are making and how they stack up. That means you need to have some idea of what other options are.This can get very complex very fast, so let’s narrow it down and focus on two of the chief tradeoffs teams will make every game: Farm Distribution and risk. How do teams distribute their available resources? Which heroes get the safe farming areas, such as the hard camps near mid-lane, or the ancients when surrounded by their team? Who gets delegated to farm the riskier areas? Does a team take risks farming, by sending a hero to solo farm a lane with the enemy initiators and one or more damage dealers off the map? When the enemy team has 3 or more heroes off the map, how many heroes will a team split up to farm at once? How far apart will they move?One of the most poignant examples so far is OG vs Wings, game 1. Wings sported a low-damage lineup with monstrous amounts of Antimage hatred: Chrono, Doom, adaptive strike, Tornado, Deafening Blast, Glimpse, and Static Storm all made life a living hell for Miracle. But Wings itemized for this at the cost of doing very little damage to a spread out OG. Arguably the most telling decision in the game didn’t happen in a teamfight but during the periods of quiet farming.Notice how Notail (Death Prophet, Orange), only gets a tiny portion of the safe farm on the map, while Miracle (Antimage, Purple), gobbles it all up.Thus OG ended up in a bad situation where all of their farm was on Miracle, the one hero who Wings had all the answers for. This was compounded by the fact that Miracle didn’t play very well, and itemized very poorly, only getting a BKB late in the game after losing half a dozen fights to Invoker disables and adaptive strikes. Unfortunately for OG, his linken’s did very little.It’s easy to analyze this game and blame Notail, and he did have some inefficient map movements, but the farm distribution was a team decision overall, and OG invested an enormous amount in Miracle that didn’t pay off. Miracle was farming his 8th and 9th slot items when Notail couldn’t even get his 4th slot filled. Maybe OG’s approach could’ve worked if Miracle had played and itemized at the level Burning did against Secret last year , but it was simply far too risky. Had they distributed it more evenly and given Notail some room to grow, he might not have gotten obliterated in every fight - which kept him poor as a pauper - and then he could’ve picked up the slack when Miracle kept getting permanently disabled.One last trend you may have spotted, compared to TI5, is the downfall of the farmed supports. At TI5 it was common to see Aui, Puppey, DDC, MMY, or Q solo pushing out sidelanes in risky areas instead of huddling behind their carry as heroes like Dazzle or Winter Wyvern. These players would routinely get 100-120 creeps by 40 minutes. This is not the case at TI6, where 70-80 creeps at 40 minutes is a pretty farmed support.. Sometimes when teams run a jungler, a support Mirana, or a low-farm offlaner like Nyx, the supports can take up some of the empty space given from Nyx’s map dominance. But often you will simply see 2-3 heroes covering the two main cores, with the remainder of farm going to the offlaner. That shows a trade-off of teams playing safer, taking less risks in their farming stances, and giving priority to the cores above all else.At the highest level of play, teamfights are characterized by two major aspects: coordinated burst [and saves], and controlling areas of the battlefield. Since 5v5 teamfights dominate the current strategy, it’s necessary to pay attention to how teams attempt to control the battlefield if you want to understand why certain teams repeatedly win fights.Wings makes a tough judgment call early on - to contest DC outside their tower. At this point DC is ahead in fighting power, with Axe also having an aegis. After a support gets X’d, Moo jumps in, intending to set up a dive for his team to followup on. Yet Wings don’t let DC follow through on this plan: first Innocence lifts Moo before the call goes off with lightning reflexes, throwing him out of the way.Then, most critically, Faith Bian and Blink choose not to help their 3 teammates kill the Axe, but instead zone out the rest of DC, trusting their teammates to handle the now isolated Axe. Then, once the aegis is triggered, 2 Wings heroes that killed the aegis move up to help their buddies, quickly gunning down Misery and W33, while Innocence prevents Axe from assisting. At multiple points this fight the Wings players instantly decided how to best distribute their heroes, and trusted each other to make the right movements. As a result, DC’s heroes couldn’t properly focus, while Wings could first stall the team and overwhelm Axe, then stall Axe and overwhelm the team.In the deciding fight of the epic LGD/Secret game, LGD managed to create the ideal teamfight that they had failed to do the entire game. The fight begins with a roar onto Xiao8, who is saved at low hp. The natural play for Secret here, given their near-parity in farm to LGD, is to overwhelm LGD before Xiao8 gets healed back up and Secret is left with roar on cooldown and nothing to show for it. Thus EternalEnvy charges out after LGD and BKB’s, expecting immediate backup. Yet as soon as Envy and Arteezy start to move forward, Maybe blinks in on Secret’s backline, cutting them (SD, VS, BM) off from their two cores. This looks so simple and is so easy to miss, yet it's these kind of plays that make Maybe the best in the world.A good Lotus Orb by PLD saved the team from Omnislash, but this uses up the valuable 5 seconds of EE’s BKB. Arteezy make a tough choice to help his team instead of Envy, but right as they are about to deliver the coup de grace to Maybe, MMY blinks in and hits a 4 man curse, allowing Maybe to escape.While Maybe and MMY are keeping the other 4 Secret heroes at bay, Xiao8, Agressif, and Banana are kiting and killing EternalEnvy outside the base, who is denied the backup he desperately needed and should have had. As his BKB charge ended, Envy looked back for his teammates only to see them zoned off from him.This is one of those fights where nobody did anything wrong: Secret made the expected move and LGD made great plays in response. The sheer speed at which it happened blindsided Secret and prevented them from reacting as a cohesive unit. As in the Wings example, LGD accurately assessed the proper distribution of their heroes: they were able to use 2 heroes to cut off 4 of Secret’s, while cleanly killing EE in a 3v1.Analyzing drafts is an amazingly complex thing, but many love talking about it. Unless you are a top pro, you probably can’t do it well at all. But who says you have to analyze a draft totally? Why not just focus on a couple key points to avoid getting lost in a deluge of details? Let’s take a look at the Wings/EG game as an example. What’s most important to focus on here? I’d limit it to three variables to start with.I always start with how teams will do damage. Is their damage bursty or over time? Is it single target or aoe? How many heroes can effectively deal damage? How many heroes can effectively deal damage when enemy bkb’s are up?The characteristic of how a team deals damage determine how they will set up their fights. But you can’t compare it in a vacuum, as you have to take into account how the enemy team will try to deal damage and prevent damage.In this case, both Wings and EG do mostly single target damage, with the exception of Slark’s cleave from empower during RP. Wing’s damage past 20 minutes is limited solely to the empowered Slark, while their advantage is that they have multiple ways to initiate, drag EG’s heroes way out of position with hook and lasso, and prevent the rest of that hero’s friends from helping with Mag and Rubick.Wings controls the map by threat of mass initiation at multiple points, forcing EG to stay tightly grouped, since even if Bat and Bat are showing in a lane, Pudge, Slark, and Rubick can easily gank multiple heroes out of position simultaneously. EG on the other hand can’t initiate for beans, but they can still control the map with Nightstalker’s vision advantage, which will narrow Wing’s pickoff and farming opportunities plus giving EG advance warning against any blink initiations.The less initiation or teamfight initiation a team has, the more important the initiation it has. A carry void, as a solo initiator in a tri-core lineup, is under a lot of pressure and is less likely to produce a good chrono than an offlane void who also has a blink Lion that can initiate. The more sources of initiation you have, the better each one becomes, since there is more the enemy has to account for. In the above example, if there was no Bat, Rubick, or Pudge, EG would be very acutely aware of the danger of the RP. But because EG’s crucial hero (Huskar) gets pummeled and the hero that is supposed to save him (Wisp) is picked off first due to awful positioning, EG has no choice but to make a headlong dash to save Sumail, which sets up an easy RP.You’ll see this happen a lot with lower level players who will brag about getting a 4 man ravage or big Impale. But they are focusing on the wrong point - the issue is not how many people they catch in their stun. The stun is only a means to the desired end: killing people. So oftentimes a 2 man ravage where the carries can hit the stunned enemies without interruption is better than a 4 man ravage where your team isn’t ready to attack during the stun.In this case, Blink’s Batrider held Sumail’s Huskar in place for Slark to beat on. Sumail died too quickly because Zai’s bad Wisp positioning let Shadow simply kill him to start with under a sentry. Meanwhile, Faith_bian’s RP prevented EG’s heroes from interfering while Slark beat down a disabled Huskar, and while he avoided the RP, Fear arrived too late to do anything since EG hadn’t been tightly grouped to start.Wings would later lose fights and the game due to Shadow getting focused early on, or his teammates unable to create the ideal scenario of “Shadow beats on out of position, disabled targets one-by-one,” while EG was able to move fast enough to create fights where they could simply out-trade and out-last Wings in the straight up manfights that their lineup excelled at.Finally, let’s take an overall look of the strategic paradigms that dominated the group stage. Right now the two most important points teams are focusing on are:Defending and breaking high groundHaving the right initiation against enemy heroes that forces them to 5 man more often than they’d like.You may have noticed that this TI has had the most upsets since, well, ever. There’s a lot of reasons for this. But the primary reason for this is the meta. Just like the Frankfurt Major Meta, the TI6 groups has a strategic landscape dominated by a few different scenarios that almost require hard counters to compete or avoid a situation where one must outplay the opponent massively. The ability for teams to outplay each other is less than ever, and in its place, luck and very polarizing strategies heavily influence the outcome of games.TI6 is currently dominated by two opposing forces: the incredible ability of teams to turtle with lategame illusion armies or Elder Titan, versus the ability to end games very early, before key items are obtained. Against turtling teams, one has to not only get a big lead early, but have the right tools and safe execution for breaching high-ground for low risk. Or they can attempt to break the base well before the turtling team can get online with a Drow or Huskar based lineup. Against these early pushes, rubberband scarcely matters because the defending team often doesn’t have the critical items and levels to stop the push anyway.Simply put, it is very difficult to hold the base early on against these Huskar/Oracle, or Huskar/Wisp lineups. Many games are simply lost in the draft phase, or simply because a team made one or two mistakes early on. Against these Huskar and/or Drow lineups, teams often just end up in a situation where the Huskar and Drow are untouchable, because nobody can trade against them effectively or sit in the front, like a Dragon Knight could. Meanwhile, the other 4 heroes can sit well out of initiation range, confident nobody can burst down the Huskar or kill Drow without overcommitting and dying.MVP are just forced to watch their base die, because they can’t possibly engage with Newbee’s fragile heroes all out of reach.You can attempt to fight these lineups by daring wrap-around smokes like Wings against OG, catching the critical Oracle from behind. You can also attempt to pack enough wave-clear, spam, and initiation threat like Elder Titan or Batrider like Fnatic used against VG.R. You can put significant pressure on the Drow itself, but that often sacrifices other lanes due to Drow aura. The best way is to combat the deathball on the map by aggressively pushing lanes, forcing their heroes to split up, and pouncing on them individually as Wings did against Navi. But this poses a grave risk, as Wing’s found out: all of their excellent pickoffs were completely negated by one good smoke and teamfight from Navi, leading to a highground siege they couldn’t hold.Pay special attention to how Blink’s TA (teal) got tracked, then moved left to the ancients, making Dendi feel safer to for the rune, where he was ambushed before even reaching it.Yet these somewhat allin push strats are a symptom of a larger problem: how to close out games. Given the ability of heroes like Morphling, Naga, or Terrorblade to keep sidelanes pushed out at very little risk, teams that get locked in their base still can keep up in farm, as TNC’s Alchemist/Terrorblade did against LGD.What’s worse, the presence of Elder Titan and/or Shadow Demon illusion spam makes it near-impossible to safely breach the base. LGD consistently outplayed TNC on the map, but once LGD gave up a couple kills to some rng smokes, they couldn’t outfight the illusion spam and acid spray from Shadow Demon, Terrorblade, and Alchemist. Even though TNC gave up most of the map, LGD couldn’t force the issue effectively and eventually lost. Secret tried to repeat this achievement against LGD, but eventually got outplayed enough times that they collapsed. Yet both these examples are striking cases where a team that got outplayed for the majority of the game could still hang on and mount comebacks by some very easy and brainless play.Ehome needed a 50k lead to close out Secret who was forced to 5 man from minute 15. This is whyIt is this area that Ehome has shined the most. They have been the most innovative in creating better ways to crack highground. Lanm, possibly the support of the tournament so far, has excelled on a Kunkka who not only can make plays all game, but also give his team risk-free highground attempts. It isn’t foolproof, as the above example showed, but it is the best ray of hope. Along with the Kunkka, Ehome has also sported Wing’s Shadow Demon+Luna combo to safely break base with mass glaive illusions. Accordingly, while other teams have dropped loads of won games due to highground failures, Ehome has limited this to one meek loss against DC.As I outlined in a previous article here , the power of rubberband, combined with the current strong defensive meta heroes (ET, SD), make it an obscenely risky proposition to attempt to breach highground when ahead. Teams are very leery about giving up large leads in seconds, and accordingly, will do whatever it takes to avoid the failed highground assault. Thus far, however, only Ehome has managed to consistently create drafts that can take highground without risk and control the map effectively to get that lead in the first place.The problem is that it is not just breaching highground that is an issue. When a team has little of the map to cover due to turtling, and the dominant team needs to farm large portions of the map to increase their lead, that opens up opportunities for RNG smokes by the turtling team. All they need is to get one pick, and not only does the map open up, but they get a very large amount of gold and xp back.The second element that teams are focusing heavily on is vision and movement. Simply put, the heavy cost of rubberband deaths force teams to minimize needless dying whenever possible. That means moving as 5 when the enemy could be making an aggressive move, so they don’t give away deaths for nothing. The tradeoff for moving as 5 is that you don’t push out waves as well and farm less overall, making aggressive movements harder. Yet when faced with uncertain enemy movements, almost all teams [except Wings] opt for safe clumped play, because the math makes a decent % chance of a cheap death nowhere near worth the value in farming a few extra creep camps.But, pros will try to gain every advantage they can, and the current means of doing that is by “cheating” and not moving as 5 when the key enemy heroes are off the map. Many players will try to play the odds and hope they or their team don’t get caught by the full enemy team when not together. Accordingly, many teams are optimizing their drafts to account for this possibility of farming more than is safe, by controlling vision, movement, and burst to rapidly punish offenders with heroes like Axe, Mirana, Night Stalker, Riki, Kunkka, Disruptor, Timber, Beast Master, Kotl, and even Wing’s Centaur Warrunner.The primary deciding factor for MVP’s surprise victory over OG was that OG continuously tried to take more than they safely could from the map, and MVP punished them with some very incisive ganks. In the deciding play of game 1, OG is in a very strong position, but instead of pushing as 5, or defending as 5, Miracle decides he can safely farm his t3 tower alone. In a daring move, MVP waited outside at top with all 5 heroes to jump Miracle in his base. Given the fact that the creep wave was already at OG’s base, this single death lead to a total rout and quick MVP victory. Not one to be daunted by failure, Miracle tried to get away with the exact same thing in game 3.In the first example, part of OG farms top while 4 MVP heroes push middle. Miracle thinks it is safe to farm alone bottom under his tower with 4 heroes showing middle. However, he makes the critical mistake of lasering a creep, leaving him open to getting jumped by QO. As soon as this laser happens, QO calls over his team from mid, and this results in a running fight that begins with Miracle dead and chrono expended. Had OG fought this with all 3 heroes behind Miracle to start with, MVP could’ve never pulled it off (or even 2 heroes behind, with a 3rd ready to TP).In the second example, Notail attempts to farm the ancients, while his team is spread all over the place. OG’s major tactical flaw in this game 3 was the supports not giving Notail enough cover, especially after they ill-advisedly forced fights early on in mid-lane and got him killed. In this case, had OG been waiting behind Notail, with Miracle ready to TP, they could have either punished or dissuaded MVP from ganking, and secured Notail some badly needed farm. Instead Notail dies, and OG gave up more control.As the tournament continues, pay close attention to how closely together teams are playing when their foes are missing, and how often teams and certain players will choose to split up (like OG or DC) or stay together (like LGD). It’s also important to assess the teams best at punishing this (Wings, Ehome, MVP) and watch how they draft and move to best put themselves in situations where they can get a pick off.It’s human nature to prefer a simple explanation, even an incomplete or inaccurate one, to a complex explanation. Unfortunately in Dota, things are rarely simple, and even accurate statements often contain numerous unspoken assumptions that a pro will know and others will not. Yet you will still be given simple narratives that attempt to explain complex scenarios, which unfortunately have gaping holes. Here’s a few examples out of a great many that show how easy it is to fall for an oversimplified scenario.We’ve just been sold a tale that apparently it was just EE and bad drafting that held Secret back in their loss against LGD, despite the valiant effort and amazing play of Pieliedie and Arteezy that kept them in the game. This of course sounds nice and agreeable if you like these players, but it is far too inaccurate of a picture. In order to come to that conclusion you have to conveniently ignore the fact that Arteezy not only lost his lane so hard he had to retreat into the jungle by 2.5 minutes, but also that Arteezy fed at top and bottom later on in very dubious positions on Alchemist, the one hero you can’t carelessly die on. Nor can pieliedie be effusively praise unless you cover your eyes to the fact that he made no impact in the laning phase, and was rarely at the point of conflict early. Nor can drafting serve as a valid excuse unless you forget that the exact SD, Alch, and TB combo was one that a much weaker TNC beat LGD with. And finally you have to ignore that LGD are simply amazing players who played an overall great game. Even in the case of Envy, a real assessment would take into account that EE didn't die the first 40 minutes of the game, during the point when he was most vulnerable because his team failed.Bulba took a decent portion of the blame in the Secret loss, though his lesser popularity meant he was spared more of the blame. Some of it was probably deserved, but sometimes favorite players can’t make the game-winning moves because of bad luck or they just outplayed. Here is a critical moment in the Secret LGD game where LGD dives the base, gets a pick, and attempts to flee. Bulba’s Beastmaster respawns, blinks into the middle, ready to roar Agressif’s Ember Spirit, whose linkens is broken. Then, in mid-cast animation, Agressif sees Bulba and instantly sleights, delaying the roar by a second. Once the sleight ends, Bulba is ready to roar and raises his arms in cast animation, but then gets Winter’s Cursed by MMY before the animation is able to complete.. Had Agressif and MMY not reacted instantaneously like this, LGD likely would’ve gotten wiped with EE respawning and tp’ing in. These were just small parts of a major fight, but these critical details played a massive role in the outcome. Sometimes a loss in Dota isn’t always about who to blame: there’s likely going to be a lot more to it than that.You will be sold how Miracle 1v9’d many a game, whether a win or loss. This is simple, and it sounds nice, and people will agree with it without thinking because Miracle is flashy, he’s young, and he plays for a western team. But this will ignore how his teammates all suffered to make him look good, and how well Cr1t and Fly had to play to stop Miracle from feeding away all the networth his team sacrificed to get him, by poor farming spots or bad positioning in teamfights. To believe in the silly Miracle=best player, always 1v9 argument, you’d have to just overlook how he cost OG their series against MVP by repeated poor positioning when he was the one hero in both games that OG couldn’t afford to lose.Then of course there are the counter-examples like the LGD/OG game earlier, where Cr1t and Fly make a great smoke rotation but flop the teamfight, which results in Miracle dying when he made the right play. Things are just complicated.You will be sold that Arteezy and Miracle are in a different category of player because they are 9k mmr. Some will take this as the meme it is, but most will take it unthinking at face value ignoring how they only could accomplish this on the heavily mmr-inflated Euro server, or that Illidan Stormrage, who was just a handful of points away from 9k on Europe himself, wasn’t the worst carry at TI5. Or that if you take this argument to its logical conclusion, you end up suggesting that Kaka (8550 china mmr) is a much better player than Chuan (6700 china mmr), which is of course ludicrous (both are amazing and near-equals).You will be sold how Wings.Shadow is awesome for getting a rampage against EG since that is obvious and easy to focus on, while ignoring what made it possible for his team to start the ideal fight that let him get all those kills: Innocence and Blink for farming and cutting the top waves right before the smoke and deceiving EG into spreading out to farm more camps at bottom, Shadow’s team for covering him mid and letting him push out the wave safely, the very fast smoke timing after these two farming instances, the approach angle that let them arrive when EG hadn’t grouped together tightly yet, and a good deal of simply luck.Beware the simple explanation, because it hides so many unspoken assumptions and logical continuations that may very well be false. And once you can see beyond the superficialities, enjoy the rich strategy that shapes the game. Writer