Betting: October 4th (Worlds 2019 - Play-In Stage - Day 3)

Before diving into today's slate I thought I'd take some time to go over a few things from a wild first few days. 

Firstly, we can prognosticate for weeks before an event like this, come to all sorts of conclusions and then, similar to the NCAA basketball tournament, have our entire bracket blown up in a single game. It's the nature of these international tournaments (and best of ones) when you don't see them nearly as often as you used to in the professional League scene. There's an element of randomness in the sense that we don't know how these teams, when analyzed out of context, match up against one another but that's the beauty of it all isn't it? For lack of a better term "this is why we play the games" and that's awesome!

Secondly, there have been a few surprisingly performances but generally speaking in these two day, round robin best of one groups we get a combination of regression to the mean, some teams "figuring it out," the "backs against the wall" boost, and sometimes the "we're eliminated let's have fun" narrative. There are a few of these situations where we could see one team potentially playing a meaningless game with nothing but pride on the line. DO NOT COUNT OUT THESE TEAMS! Often when the pressure is off they loosen up and play their game. For a lot of these smaller region players this is the biggest tournament of their life and they may not ever get back here, also it's one of their only chances to play against major region talent. They take it to heart. 

Thirdly, don't overreact to one game. Nerves, travel, "feeling each other out," genuine randomness, weird picks, new players, there's a lot of variables in these games for us to judge these teams simply on the two games we've seen. Typically you'll see things average out which leads me to my selections for tomorrow...

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Worlds 2019 - Play-In Stage - Day 3

Unicorns of Love +200 vs Clutch Gaming -260

Splyce -925 vs Detonation FocusMe +550

Unicorns of Love -170 vs Mammoth +140

Isurus Gaming -180 vs Detonation FocusME +150

Clutch Gaming -490 vs Mammoth +355

Isurus Gaming +420 vs Splyce -590

I'll be making three wagers tomorrow:

Moneyline: DFM +642 vs Splyce (1.1 unit)(Nitrogen)

Moneyline:  DFM +150 vs Isurus (2 units)(5D)

This will mean I've bet DFM in all four of their games which might look a bit like I've got tunnel vision for a team I was slightly higher on than most but DFM have had a few costly and, more importantly, uncharacteristic mistakes in both games so far that I expect them to clean up. The Nocturne mid against Splyce was completely out of left field from a team that typically plays things pretty normal. At the risk of soundling like a TSM fan I'm going to say that I wish DFM wouldn't put their best player on Karma even though Ceros made a few nice plays on it. The champion is still strong but, in my opinion, not strong enough to be a blanket blind pick after the nerfs she received for this patch. I want to see your best player on a carry and I expect them to make this adjustment. 

I don't think DFM have too much of a chance against Splyce but they were honestly a play or two going right early from that game being the upset we'd predicted. I'm wondering if they have something spicier cooked up or whether they'll just settle down now that they've got some feel for Splyce. Either way I think these odds are worth a low risk lottery ticket style wager. It's a best of one. A lot of weird stuff can happen. We'll take the flier there.

I could go on a small rant about my beef with the constant riding of the "LATAM Super Team" but I'll save that digression for the podcast. DFM had that weird dragon fight with Steal getting caught on Ekko and this game sort of got out of hand from there. This was a weird one. It wasn't quite "go next" in a scrim setting weird but it was odd. DFM have been making a lot of uncharacterstic mistakes. This is a team that was very intelligent domestically. Perhaps that's because they weren't challenged from a mechanical or strategic standpoint but they were very controlled and diligent. Let's take a shot on some regression going both ways here.

Moneyline: Unicorns of Love -170 vs Mammoth (2 units)(5D)

Mammoth looked pretty sharp in their win I'll admit. Their decisiveness around the baron is something NA fans should take note of but I think UOL turn it around here. I had UOL as one of the top play-in teams (along with Royal Youth... more on that tomorrow) and I still think they'll be one. A brief aside but Tristana seems incredibly potent against a lot of these mistake prone teams and we saw that in MMM's win as well as some others anyway I digress...

 Consider this a "get right" spot and for UOL to pull out all the stops. We're actually getting a good number on this as I expected it to be closer to -300 still even with the win for MMM. Regression both ways and getting a relatively good number on a better team? I'll take it.