It’s no question we love stats, and we love Dota. There was a patch where Pudge inexplicably jumped several percentage points in win rate, and our team spent nearly an hour talking about what could be the culprit. In the end, it was a bug that increased his Rot damage. Of course.

One of our goals of the blog is to connect with and support the community, and mostly we write about what we like to write about, but some of our most popular posts are about how to get better at Dota.

It’s been nearly a year since this blog surfaced, and we understand some of its content can get buried. So, in case you missed it, here are some of our favorites.

If you've ever been too anxious to play ranked because you're afraid you might lose, we wrote a post about how to manage ladder anxiety. Some of us today watch more Dota than play it, partly because of time commitments, but I suspect it's also because it's less stressful. Remember, you can still have fun playing this game, even when you lose.

This topic is no stranger to anyone who plays Dota. The game can be frustrating, maddening, and turn us into the worst part of ourselves. Kawaiisocks talks about human behavior, and how we can manage our emotions during a game.

One other post is about how to think during a game and what you can do to improve your decision making. We talk about how he gets in the zone, how to make snap decisions, and how to stay focused.

In this two part series, Kawaiisocks talks about all those little keypresses and clicks that come second nature to experienced players, yet no one really talks about them. When we think about getting better at Dota, we think about strategy, item builds, drafts, laning, movement, and timing, but rarely do we talk about hotkeys, cast points, shift-queuing, or backswing animations. Often it's the little things that count. As he mentions in his article, you can turn a fight alone by taking advantage of instant cast spells, such as Hex to sheep a Magnus during his Reverse Polarity animation.

Our next post we'll be talking about one of our newest features, Hero Rankings, taking a closer look at some of the top players on their signature heroes.