EPT
We can ask ourselves: How can the players underestimate their opponent in a tournament like TI4, where any slight slip up means you're out of the tournament? The spectator community is clearly biased towards their idols and will support the teams where their favorite players play. In LGD’s case, they don’t have players like singsing, BurNing, iceiceice, or similarly popular players. Their most known player is Yao, BuLba's favorite, but that's it. Few really knew or cared about Rabbit, Lin and the others because they're not as famous or as popular as the previously mentioned players. But professional players don't have this excuse. With 7-8 record in the second round of the Playoffs, with wins against Alliance and c9, LGD definitely wasn't the free-win that team thought they were. If LGD had managed to win against Na'Vi.us, they would have finished 8-7 and in a better position for the third round of the playoffs.
There is a clear disparity between what the players predicted about LGD's performance and their actual performance (to be fair, Arteezy understood this when he said that LGD was a scary team in spite of being a dark horse), and investigating this can help us shed light on the nature of Dota as a game.
Dota is a clash of forces, permeated by all kinds of factors. As such, the emotions cannot fail to be involved. In essence, Dota is war and its element is one of danger and uncertainty. Because Dota deals with living forces, it can never be absolute, it can never reach certainty. If we’re allowed to paraphrase the great philosoper of war Clausewitz, all actions in Dota are clouded in the fog of uncertainty. In this cloud, Dota is not a simple mathematical game with a fixed solution. Countless small inaccuracies - the kind that can never be foreseen and can easily be ignored - could combine together to hurt the team. A slight mistake can prevent a team from seeing the enemy in time, from engaging when they should, from communicating something they should.
Every game of Dota is rich in these circumstances. Each is an uncharted sea, full of dangers that the player might even be dimly aware of, but which cannot be directly seen with the eye. The dilemma for the player and his team is to make an assessment of the game and actually navigate across this sea. Experienced players know that he might be wrong. If he's not correct about the state of himself and his enemy, it's very likely that he will be walking directly into defeat's jaws. The good player must make preparations against possible threats instead of innocently expecting the tame standard outcomes. Both luck and experience can help the player make adjustments to deal with the disparity between his actual performance and his idealised performance in his mind. Accomplished players of every kind of sport train really hard to make this their second nature, to make it an instinct.
By belittling any team in any tournament, teams are crippling themselves mentally. They are crossing an uncharted sea during the night, fully expecting safe passage, and blinding themselves to the rocks that may lie in their path and sink their ships. It sets a suboptimal mindset on his team. One of the most valuable asset of a player is his sense of his strength compared to the dangers that lie in the cloud of uncertainty in which Dota happens. Dota is not an exercise of the will directed to an inanimate object, but to an animate object that reacts. To assume that the enemy team will not adapt against your strategy is a recipe for defeat and the true meaning of underestimating. As such, players shouldn't try to establish a fixed system of rules that must be followed for optimal results, but instead they should seek to improve their personal ability of making intuitive or analytical judgments in the most adverse, dangerous and strange conditions.
