Monday, March 16, 2020

March 17th: LPL

March 16th Recap:



LPL: 1 - 2 (+0.14 units)

Live: 0 - 1 (-2.5 units)


TOTAL: 1 - 3 (-2.36 units)


I fired off the -2.5 shortly after the first blood for Vici in game three. After evaluating both team compositions I figured JDG needed to get the snowball started early or fights would become extremely difficult to navigate. They gave Vici first blood and the game actually moved pretty slowly, just as you'd want. Vici had some poor setups considering how tricky it can be for Miss Fortune to position against a Reksai and a Leblanc. Sometimes when you have the Jarvan/Galio cannonball setup you can get baited into diving when in reality you just need to set a line for your Miss Fortune to do the work. iBoy navigated this game about as well as you could but JDG just simply outplayed it. I maybe undersold that the mobility would make good ult combos difficult but generally I think VG just needed to play this more front to back and less dive-oriented.

Meteor is still a monster on his champions and put on a clinic with the Olaf to snowball BiliBili to a game one win. Game two BiliBili tried the Quinn counterpick in the top lane against Renekton but the real star was Icon on Leblanc. There were a ton of really close fights in this game that could have gone either way in a lot of situations but OMG navigated better. Game three was much slower paced, almost looking like an LCK game which is typically the wheelhouse of BiliBili. BiliBili had a classic 4-1 setup with a Camille as the split push, Varus as a soft counter to Zoe in the mid lane, and a Miss Fortune/Naut bottom lane to manage Smlz's Caitlyn in the bottom lane. In this composition you use the Varus and Miss Fortune to wave clear while Camille splits. OMG had very limited engage to dive and punish a lopsided fight but what BiliBili didn't account for was Zoe and Caitlyn as a combination can still siege a tower, poke fights out, and gneerally punish your similar lack of long range engage. OMG slowed the early game down to outscale some of the Elise potency and eventually took a cloud soul and a baron to, what looked like, take the game. OMG had to go to a second baron because of BiliBili's wave clear and this fight resulted in a 3 for 0 for BiliBili and a lost mid inhibitor. BiliBili turned it into an elder drake. Somehow OMG managed the next few fights (Caitlyn range) and beat an elder buff. They won a close next few fights and took the game down.

I'm a little annoyed at how OMG handled the second baron fight. When you have a Zoe you have to assume you deal much less damage to neutral objectives so it's better to turn instead of 50/50 a baron and likely lose the fight. This is one of the weaknesses Zoe has as a champion. She's not very good at fast, in your face fights or at peeling back from fights. She wants to set up, poke, and fight on her terms. Baron is the the worst thing for a Zoe team to get engaged on at because it's really simple for the enemy team to do so. Many teams have punted massive leads by overestimating their ability to handle the other team just bullrushing you at baron and that was almost the case here. OMG had superior scaling or this likely would have been a punted game. Got a little lucky but OMG were the better team overall on the day.

I didn't have anything on the V5 vs eStar game but they finally mixed things up... sort of. I was skeptical about trusting a one-trick like eStar has been. Every game they've had this set bottom lane dive play. It's predictable, you know they're going to draft for it and teams hadn't figured it out yet. This time they at least mixed it up with a mid counter gank first before diving bot. It's hard to tell if this was just happenstance or if Wei intended on hovering mid. Usually you don't want to gank an Azir lane so I tend to think this was just a weird coincidence. They didn't exactly close these games out well either. Still a ton of questionable fights in the mid game. This team still just looks like a bunch of bulls in a china shop but so did FunPlus Phoenix for awhile so maybe it can work. eStar still need to show me that they can do anything else because they've lost every single game that bot dive has been thwarted.


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LPL (China)


Week 3 - Day 2

Rogue Warriors +236 (+1.5 @ -141)

vs
EDward Gaming -350 (-1.5 @ -102)

Lineups:

RW: Crazy, WeiYan, Ruby, ZWuji, Ley
EDG: Xiaoxiang, JunJia, Scout, Hope, Meiko

Rogue Warriors put up a fight against Invictus but as I mentioned extensively in my post-match breakdown, it somewhat looked like Invictus were just playing with their food. So how much of what we saw from Rogue Warriors was something to legitimately be impressed about? Honestly it's hard to tell. I liked their conviction and they looked much stronger with Crazy in the lineup for games two and three but I get the feeling like RW were up for that game and Invictus were not and they STILL LOST. 


EDG have looked pretty solid considering their substitute situation they're coping with but there's still a lot of question marks in general about this team. They still look like the intelligent squad they've always been and I have to think that just gives them an edge over these bottom of the table teams. I'm not very high on eStar and I think they're probably slightly better than Rogue Warriors. 


All that said, underdogs are 22 - 15 against the spread in the LPL and I think if you consider that Rogue Warriors looked really confident and able to rumble in scrappy games with a team like Invictus, I have to think they're likely to take a game here. Compound that with the fact that EDG are still figuring themselves out a bit with these subs and a few miscommunications could lead to a game loss rather easily. I'm not high on Rogue Warriors but I do like the underdog spread here.


Spread: Rogue Warriors +1.5 @ -141 (1.41 units)(Nitrogen)


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FunPlus Phoenix -1136 (-1.5 @ -207)

vs
Team WE +543 (+1.5 @ +147)

Lineups:

FPX: GimGoon, Tian, Doinb, Lwx, Crisp
WE: Morgan, Beishang, Plex, Jiumeng, Missing


WE received a bit of a reality check against RNG on Sunday. Their win in week one seven weeks ago against JDG combined with two decisive victories against Vici and V5 had a lot of people riding the hype train. It's not to say there isn't things to be excited about with this squad but I do think the train was due for a derailment against a quality opponent like RNG. Now WE get to face FPX. 


Looked decent but not quite "world champion" level good in their two matches before the break before coming back and playing a slugfest against JDG and utterly destroying Dominus. Doinb received player of the week honors with a blend of Sylas, Rumble, and a spicy Kassadin pick. I don't want to jump to any wild conclusions based on FPX dumpstering a terrible Dominus team but it looks like the boys are back in town.


FPX have had more success running with GimGoon so far and that's who they're running with. I know people like WE and I think they've overachieved what I expected from them going into the season but we saw what happened when they faced an elite team in RNG, they got completely destroyed. I feel like the same thing happens here.


Spread: FPX -1.5 maps @ -195 (1.95 units)(5Dimes)


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LOOK AHEAD to Saturday March 21st 5am Eastern


Moneyline: BiliBili Gaming +172 (1 unit) 
Spread: BiliBili -1.5 maps @ +395 (0.5 units) 

 Long story short, the more I'm watching eStar the more fraudulent I'm thinking this team is. They do the exact same set play every single game, they don't mix it up unless they're disrupted and teams have yet to adapt to it. Even with teams not adapting to it, a relatively easy thing to do if you recognize it on film, they're still almost losing games. People are WAY overhyping this team. They're going to struggle against more intelligent teams that can see this sort of thing and prepare for it. BiliBili are one of those teams.

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Other Leagues



none yet



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Parlays:

none for now

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