Map bans are often glossed over at the beginning of a match, however they are an extremely important part of a series. There are several factors contributing to a team’s map ban choice. For some teams, it is a given what they will ban every week as they have a dedicated ban map that they do not practice. Some teams base the ban on their recent confidence level with the map, while others determine the best course of action is to ban their opponent's strongest map. This simple decision at the beginning of a series can have monumental effects on the flow of the match.

Starting with some basic statistics from the regular season of Phase 2 of 2017, we can compare the common ban trend differences among regions. It is important to note that there are two missing data points for Korea due to the forfeited match between Tempest and RRR.

The most immediately visible trend is how consistent the map bans of Braxis Holdout and Warhead Junction were in Korea.

In 30 of the 55 matches in KR, the two banned maps in the match were Warhead and Braxis.

This contrasts strongly with North America (NA) where of the 21 Braxis bans, 13 are from Lag Force and half of the remaining were specifically against Gale Force Esports. Warhead is similar in NA. Space Station Gaming banned it 6 of the 10 times. Beyond this, it was simply an occasional ban against a team that had chosen it before. Often at international competitions when Warhead or Braxis is banned against an NA team by another region, people would say it’s a respect ban, but in reality many international teams are already banning these maps in most of their matches. Though I think we can all concede that Roll 20’s Warhead was pretty scary and well-deserving of the bans it received.

The age-old question surrounding map bans has always been: is it better to consistently ban a map and dedicate more practice time to the other 8 maps, or is it better to remain flexible to use it as a tool against opponents? I examined map ban data to determine if there was any correlation surrounding the consistency of team’s map ban rates and their win rate. This scatter plot shows all the teams divided by region. The x-axis is overall win rate, and y-axis is the percent of a team’s matches that they banned their most frequently selected map ban. For example, if a team banned Warhead 9 of their 14 matches, their highest individual map ban rate would be 64%.

There is no significant correlation at first glance so let’s look at it a little more broadly. I split up the teams as those who banned a single map above 70% of the time and those who banned a single map less than 70% of the time.

The twelve teams that were in the above 70% group had an average win rate of 59%.

The twelve teams that were in the below 70% group had an average win rate of 40%.

This is a considerable difference. However, it’s important to note that there are some outliers, like of course MVP Black who banned Warhead in 12 of their 14 matches with a 100% win rate or Crucible teams. To compensate for this, I also ran the numbers removing the bottom two teams and the top two teams from every region.

The remaining four teams in the above 70% group had a win rate of 45%.

The remaining eight teams in the below 70% group had a win rate of 53%.

The gap closed and shifted. The reason this change affected the numbers so much is because 5 of the 6 regional top teams fall into the above 70% category: Team Freedom, Roll 20, Fnatic, Dignitas, and MVP Black. The only team that didn’t was Ballistix. The fact that most of the top teams appear to believe consistent map banning is the better strategy speaks more to its merit than the statistics can at the moment. The differences are definitely noteworthy enough to indicate that this is a statistic to watch in 2018 to see if a stronger correlation arises and the top teams maintain this strategy.

Separating the data by region, the average percent of a team’s matches that they banned their individual most frequently selected ban map were

68% in NA

74% in EU

61% in KR

One reason to note why KR might be the lowest is because so many teams have either Warhead or Braxis as their ban map that teams are forced into banning something else if the other team bans their map first. I decided to start factoring in internationals, playoffs, and tiebreakers to see how it changed the numbers. The new results were

63% NA

72% EU

55% KR

The lowering of all of the averages points to the fact that people are often more likely to try different strategies in important matches to catch their opponent off guard. For example, a team may practice a map that had been previously considered their ban map in secret for weeks to surprise the opponent by banning offensively instead of defensively.

Factoring in internationals and playoffs, the most consistent team in 2017’s Phase 2 was Team Dignitas. They banned in Warhead Junction 26 of their 29 matches, which is a 90% rate. Now that Warhead is out of the map pool, it will be interesting to see if Team Dignitas maintains that level of consistency with a new map or if they begin to diversify. The least consistent team was Tempest. Their most banned map was Braxis which they banned in only 8 of their 22 games, which is a 36% rate. Tempest performed really well over the season which demonstrates that there is no ‘correct’ strategy. However, they were the first KR team to lose a series to an NA team in a long time so it’s possible that they may rethink how they do map picks and bans this upcoming phase.

Out of the total number of map bans, Warhead made up 24.6% of bans, beaten only by Braxis which was 25.4%.The recent announcement that Warhead will be replaced by Volskaya Foundry in 2018 is inevitably going to change the ban map meta. Will ban consistency rates drop drastically as a result or will Volskaya simply fill its spot and be banned just as often? Will Braxis bans skyrocket now that teams no longer have to worry about Warhead? Or will an even more surprising ban map become the new standard? I hope this data helped bring to light a few of the possible larger implications surrounding map bans and why these are important questions to ask going into Phase 1 of HGC 2018.