EPT
For those of you who haven't read my earlier blog, I went to SG to play dota in team korea. We actually had a last minute member change from boden to xD.Scout, long time teammate and friend of mine who doesn't play much dota since his glory days, especially since he's doing his military service (not army). But he's still a lot more reliable than most competitive korean players you can find.
I'm actually at a pc bang right now with my teammates (ADC match tomorrow). So I'll upload pics when I get home.
Anyway, back to how we did in the tourney. We were supposedly the underdogs this tourney but I knew that we were stronger than the previous teams since we had pretty strong members and 2 players with experience in IDEC and other foreign leagues that aren't accessible to 'koreans' such as myself so we were more flexible. Plus we played together in LAN a lot to practice our coordination and strategies.
We were in group A which consisted of SG, KOR, New Zealand and India. New Zealand and India we stomped (vs India we won 37-0 lol :D, but SG was a tough match. SG does indeed to take dota seriously
Replay here:
http://dota.replays.net/doc/cn/2009-7-6/12468663628321223800.html
2-3 more coordination and less silly mistakes like es using ult in middle of nowhere by accident midgame could've won us the game imo.
We got to the quarterfinals to face Indonesia, ex-XcN, a very solid team. We watched their game against Australia and they had a really weird strategy which we talked about that night. And we countered it pretty solidly, beating them something like 36-4. We had such nice picks compared to them imo. I think they were trying to do a backdoor strategy with pitlord + lycan but we kept the pressure on the whole game. 4 obs ward in jungle = slow farm on lycan.
Backdoor strats were really prevalent this year. Brood + manta morphling is a strong strat. It's so hard to take map control when you have 2 super BDers who have blink and imba move speed. So a lot of teams banned morphling at least.
After we beat Indonesia, we went on to play Vietnam (StarsBoba) and got our ass handed to us. We weren't prepared at all to deal with their strategy (morph brood -_-) and they were solid too. They defeated two-time winner china pretty convincingly.
Replay here:
http://dota.replays.net/doc/cn/2009-7-6/12468387655821201127.html
picked too many heroes that 'counter' broodling pushes instead of opting for a lineup that counters their constant lane pushing and attempts at backdooring.
I played a shitty potm
lost focus mid game since we started getting desperate as they kept owning our towers and we couldn't push any ie. no map control whatsoever. Eww just watched it for the first time.. what was I thinking.Well gratz to vietnam for winning the tourney. They beat malaysia and we played MY too in practice games and malaysia was damn good (raped us). Actually malaysia beat vietnam in the group stage but I guess giving vietnam dp and rhasta was too much especially considering vietnam banned doom in the finals.
As for the 3rd/4th placer match. We lost to singapore.. I'm not sure where I can find the replay but I'm sure it's out there since some of my friends say they watched it. But basically we pushed mid rax at 30 min, ahead in kills by 2x and more items, yet we failed to finish the game since we were too pusy to do a straight up push vs tinker, dagger es and a pretty farmed potm. Eventually tinker got both bkb and linkens rendering our doom useless. I farmed way too much money with puck and didn't get anything useful after bot guinsoos and dagger.
Fucking audience were all from SG and kept cheering and clapping every time any of us died so that didn't help our concentration late game... I even bought back as puck just as a 'fuck you, idc that I died, I have 4000+ gold, bitch' whenever the *refree* starting cheering lol. Well, having that much gold is nothing to brag about. Should've so went dagon. That was the only counter to linken bkb tinker with our lineup.
Yea... so we lost a game we had in the bag at 30 min by prolonging it for another 50 min when tinker is fully geared with 6000+ buyback money.
Pity we didn't get 3rd but it was all in all a great experience. Singaporean food owns (chili crab <3) and there were some hot girls at the event which I didn't expect at all, always a big +.
I wish we could've stayed another day after the tourney to just have fun but we had to leave 6:30 am the next morning
Random things I'd like to add:
- since 2007, the korean team has never lost a coin toss (14 times) lol
- LAN does not mean 0 ping, our practice matches the day before the tourney proved that LAN can sometimes give one team pretty bad ping for LAN which is why every time we won the coin toss we picked sentinel (sent = host)
- seeker got banned many times since some teams owned with seeker a few times apparently
