11/12 NEST LOL
TL:DR WE 2-0 / iG 2-0
From Yesterday’s article.
One thing that we need to keep in mind moving forward is the unpredictable nature of the game itself. Beyond that when additional variables are introduced that further add to the volatility the cliche anything can happen comes into play.
For this tournament, we have so many things to consider
-Mixed Rosters
-Lame Duck Meta
-Tournament Significance.
Day 3 Recap
It just seems like it’s been one of those weeks. One of the weeks where you’re just so close, but so far at the same time. You can get the end result correct, but the path to get there very wrong. While this can be discouraging there is only so much you can control when it comes to anything in life. If you’re picking the right spots and putting yourself in the best chance to succeed that’s all you can really ask. In those situations, while there will be misses along the way they tend to lead to better results sooner or later. I’d rather be on the winning side every time even if I know that side is going to have the worse score in certain outcomes. In the Suning/BLG we saw the 2-1 coming and overall for me at least the lineups themselves felt better constructing with Suning as part of the stack. It was unfortunate in their loss they weren’t able to put up much of a fight and in their wins the kill participation from the BLG side allowed them to be the higher scoring team even in a series loss. In retrospect, expecting complete cohesion or a position high scores from Suning with View a Jungler playing out of position in the top lane may have been misguided. I was able to take advantage of the +170 and score a 1.7 unit win on the straight bets.
The second game had me pretty worried. I was pretty bullish on FPX and had them in most of my builds. As it turns out I suspect my hedge lineups with eStar would have done better if they would have been able to replicate their game 1 outing. Instead, they fell apart in games 2/3 and were outclassed by the better team and players. Just like in the WE series from the day prior the better and more experience bottom line was a large part of the difference. Lwx should dominate in these situations and not doing so in game 1 was a bit puzzling to me. In-game two his 7/0/5 line helped FPX get the momentum they needed to win that game and game 3 as well. Getting Insulator onto a comfort pick of Rumble in Game 2 certainly helped as well. I took + odds on eStar in the betting market and even put a nice parlay w/ them and Suning that could have been a solid 6.5 unit pick up. After the game 2 draft the FPX series line slipped to +220 so I was able to hedge out a protect the profit from game one and still have some upside in the event eStar did in fact close out the series.
In the end, one of my fades ended up being the highest-scoring player on the slate. I felt like the overall process to get where I ended up was good, but certainly had some holes that we can try to fill moving forward.
Team WE (-475) Versus OMG (+305)
Intro– Team WE enter this game as pretty substantial favorites. I’m not sure it’s as warranted as is reflected in the betting odds. Team WE did win the first series, but at times looked extremely week. Dropping the first game to what was essentially LGD’s LDL roster. With all the questions we have to answer when making lineups at least we can take solace in knowing that this is in fact the lineup that Team WE will run out every game. Teacherma announced he was stepping back from the team to focus on streaming due to health concerns. He remains a part of the team and could return at some point if they needed him. That all said I don’t think NEST is that spot. Additionally, the best player in this series resides on the Team WE bottom lane in Jiumeng. Twice in as many days, we’ve seen the better bottom lane turn things around in seemingly losing situations. On the other side, OMG had a pretty disappointing Summer Split and many of the members of that roster aren’t here. The Mid-Lane position has some uncertainty to the starter and will carry a heavy sub risk, but I’m willing to look towards any dogs to try and gain some leverage.
Team WE– Beishang/Jiumeng/Missing are all players we’ve had enough exposure to know who they are. There are two other plays that comprise of this line up let’s take a bit of deeper look at both of them.
Colton- 133 Games Played / 45.1% Win Rate / 2.84 KDA
Colton spent 2020 on the Team WE academy team splitting the top lane duties with Clever9. Not only was his opening series unimpressive, but the entire 2020 was as well. During the 26 games, he played for WEA in the spring split they went 12-14 versus 24-9 w/ Clever9. An underwhelming player statistically I’m keeping him out of any of my Team WE exposure if possible.
Shanks-13 Games Played / 76.9% Win Rate /5.41 KDA
There isn’t a ton of data on Shanks he’s relatively young in his pro career. Playing sparingly in the Spring Split for WEA he was transferred to the main roster for the Summer split where he saw no action in the LPL. In his first game in NEST he selected Oriana and registered a 0/3/4 KDA… The entire team lost hard so take it for what it is. In-game 2 they moved to the Blue side and this time Shanks played Zoe 5/2/6a much better performance but that was the case across the board. Game 3 was similar with Shanks this time on Ekko into Syndra. 5/1/5 as Team WE won their series 2-1. Overall his play was solid and he represents a safe Mid-Laner w/ very little sub risk.
Team OMG- I’m going to start this with something positive. It’s that at least we know most of the starting roster. The negative of course is who that roster is comprised of. Don’t get me wrong, of course, anything can happen, but as I dug into this a bit deeper the odds on the game seemingly make more sense. Whether it was the LPL OMG or the LDL OMD team both sides for this organization performed poorly in Summer.
Aliez- 102 Games Played / 36.3 % Win Rate / 2.23 KDA
Aliez was part of the V5 Spring Split team that didn’t win a match. In fact, they only won 1 game that entire split. Aliez happened to be playing that game in which he championed Aatrox. Not that it matters, just thought I’d throw that out there. A fairly diverse champion pool with nothing really sticking out. His most played Champions were Jayce, Wukong, Camille, and Lucian.
H4cker-302 Game Played / 43.7% Win Rate / 3.05 KDA
One of the more veteran players in the tournament H4cker provides a solid play at Jungle. If I’m stacking with RNG I’d prefer XLB, but the option is there. More than likely when playing OMG given their extreme dog status you may look for 2 stack w/ team. H4cker could fill one of those spots for you. We saw him stick mainly to Lee Sin and Trundle in Summer split with a handful of games on Volibear and graves. Given the poor showing from OMG in the Summer split it’s hard to really pull anything from the numbers themselves as they weren’t very good. That is to be expected when you’re constantly losing though.
Bright-102 Games Played / 48% Win Rate / 4.07 KDA
Playing a rather diverse champion pool in the LDL over the summer Bright appears to be a versatile mid laner with a favorite champion pick of Zoe. Again it’s difficult to pull anything from his win rate as it’s hard to figure out if it’s bad because the team was. Or if the team was bad because Bright was. Or both.
Crime-36 Games Played / 50% Win Rate / 2.67 KDA
Where bright plays a variety of champions from assassins to mages Crime tends to stay mainly on melee champions or assassins. Out of the 36 career games, more than half come on Akali,Sylas,Talon,Yasuo, and Irelia. While only 7 came on mages like Leblanc(6) and Syndra(1).
Icon-407 Games Played/ 39.3% Win Rate / 3.13
From one of the least experienced to maybe the most in the entire tournament. Icon doesn’t require much explanation. I suspect he won’t be in the starting lineup as it seems like it makes more sense to play one of the two lesser experienced mid laners here.
Eric-162 Games Played / 54.3% Win Rate / 3.98
We got to see Eric play a few games in the LPL over the summer. He did well in the games on Ashe and poorly on Ezreal. It will be interesting to see what his champion selection is here if it isn’t Ashe. He didn’t play her much in the LDL mostly spending time on Zphelios and Ezreal. I would be ecstatic if we saw him bring out Ziggs who he played 4 times with a 3-1 record in the LDL.
Bafang-207 Games Played/ 50.2% Win Rate / 3.65
Whenever it comes to the support player there’s only so much to say right? You’re likely playing the support if you have their ADC or if they play champions that can rack up some kills. Of his 70 games in 2020 Bafang most played champions are Nautilus and Sett with 13 games each.
Final Thoughts- So far we’ve only seen one series end in a sweep. This might be second one. I like Team WE here, but the -475 to win is just to steep a price for me to pay. I’m more willing to lay the -1.5 at -115 on the WE win.
DFS- WE Everyone but Colton / OMG- Eric/Bafang/H4cker (iCon if he plays)
Invictus Gaming (+105) Versus Royal Never Give Up (-140)
Intro-I started putting together this article around 9am this morning. In between parts of it I had to go out and do some work for my other job. As I was driving around the Washington DC area, on this incredibly rainy day I started thinking about what I could say about this game. My first thought was about how RNG completely threw their game the other day, and how that’s so RNG. Then I realized that when these two teams played back in Summer it was one of the more painful games for me in the entire summer split. There I was on vacation, beachside watching the slate. The first games had gone extremely well for me and the entire morning was going to be capped off by iG and RNG. This was around the time iG was bouncing back from a really rough start to the split and had just started playing to form. In the first game, RNG should have won, but lost, and then took the second. As we entered game 3 rubber match the only thing standing between me and a 20k win was a iG blow out in game three. If RNG won, or even kept it close there wasn’t any statistical way for me to lose the GPP. The game started out great, and even for a while RNG was in the lead. Then a sloppy team fight and the route was on. I went from winning 20k to losing 300 in a matter of a few minutes. It be like that sometimes. Here I do believe that recency bias will have an impact on the game and I’m surprised that RNG is the favorite. The only way that I suppose this ends up being heavier owned on the RNG side is if people look for TheShy, Rookie, and when they don’t find them they go the other way. These have to be the two most frustrating teams to roster for me, so it’s hard to pick a side.
IG-
The bottom lane needs no introduction. Puff and either Baolan or Southwind should be step above Gala and LeLe. Taking a look into the other pieces.
Zs-111 Games Played / 78.4 Win Rate / 4.17 KDA
You may be able to figure it out through the insane win rate numbers but iG Youth won the LDL regular-season split and the play offs. Posting a 22-3 regular-season record and helping fuel some of these insane numbers. In terms of champion pool, Zs played 9 different champions in summer. I know this may come as a bit of a surprise for a Chinese top laner but his most played champion was Renekton followed by Ornn, Wukong, Volibear, and Camile. So there is versatility is there.
XUN- 77 Games Played / 81.8% Win Rate / 5.9 KDA
Most likely looking to pick Graves he played him 22 times out of 65 games. He does have an ability to play outside that pick as he logged 11 games as Kindred, 10 as Ekko, and even started to play some Lillia toward the end of the split and playoffs.
Captain- 201 Games Played / 52.7% Win Rate / 4.51 KDA
I expect Captain to want to play Syndra if she’s left up as it was his most played champion. Although it may be better for fantasy if he can get his hands on LeBlanc or Zoe across 10 and 9 games respectively.
RNG-
I’m not going to break down each of the players because with the exception of LeLe these were their LPL roster for the Summer Split. They looked fantastic and lost all within the same games against VG in their opening series. The middle position is by no means safe as they swapped out Xiaohu after a great game to bring in Cryin.
Final Thoughts- I’m going to have some exposure to RNG across multiple lineups because they are the team comprised of higher league players. The context though of course is that it’s difficult to see Zs/Captain/Xun getting any time on the main team ahead of TheShy/Ning/Rookie. I’m looking for iG to take this series in a convincing fashion.
DFS Plays- IG- Everyone/Anyone – RNG- XLB/Gala/New
1 unit on iG to win +105
1.5 Unit on iG to win 2-0 @ +275
1.5 Unit on iG to win 2-1 @ +330