March 8th: LCS

March 7th Recap:

LEC: 4 - 0 (+4.0 units)
LCS: 1 - 1 (-1.22 units)

Parlays:  (+5.7565 units)



TOTAL: 5 - 1 (+8.5365 units)

We got a little lucky that Fnatic took the 50/50 baron but I'm not entirely sure they would have been able to close and win 90%+ of the time. Fnatic could have won that game, they had the lead but one error and G2 punished. The other four matches were more or less never in question. The full favorite round robin parlay hit all five legs for 26-0. Favorites continue to dominate in Europe. Every single favorite won this weekend. All ten games. That moves us to 5 out of 14 of the full days where every single favorite won. Favorites are now 54-16 on the season. Jeez....

Contrary to Europe, North America had all four underdogs win. These weren't small dogs either.

We hit on our 100 Thieves dog but they had zero business winning that game. We got lucky here.

CLG botched a tower dive bottom that gave Tactical first blood AND no loss of experience because he lived. I also loved that they knew to just swap the Viktor into the Janna lane to avoid the tough anti-tank lane. Broxah had a really tough time finding anything in this game. With and Ornn mid and a Viktor top against Janna and a bottom lane with limited gank assist he just had nowhere to go. Trundle can win the 1v1 vs Lee Sin so he was more or less stuck. So what were their options here? They could have gone with Reksai or Jarvan and maybe had a bit more success but the main reason this went poorly is that they drafted a scaling, defensive composition and just didn't countergank at all. Good on CLG who look much better but Liquid were severely handicapped even with the Ornn.

All season long FlyQuest have had an outstanding read on the metagame and have, in my opinion, won most of their drafts. I understand what they were trying to accomplish with the Ahri pick. You had to match Taliyah's shove and roaming power with someone that has a reasonable chance to 1v1 her otherwise your bottom lane was going to get dove over and over. Aphelios can only flash to escape Taliyah wall behind her and combined with the obnoxious harassing capability of the no-farm Senna and Nautilus ult Aphelios can't do anything. To me that's exactly why teams need to start audibling. Aphelios and Senna are the two highest priorities in the draft at ADC right now. If you're on red side you can't really ban Senna so teams need to make the adjustment because all other teams need to do is pick anything that can shove, roam, and dive (Taliyah, TF, Leblanc, Pantheon, etc) and you're never going to get to late game. This didn't look like a bad draft but I think as time goes on you'll see that teams start to adjust to this.



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(all lines are from Nitrogen unless stated otherwise)

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LCS (North America)

Week 7 - Day 2

TSM -118 vs FlyQuest -103 (Pinnacle)
Immortals +118 vs 100 Thieves -167
Dignitas -193 vs Golden Guardians +135
Evil Geniuses -225 vs CLG +181 (Pinnacle)

Favorites are 35 - 29 in the LCS this season.

We saw all four underdogs win yesterday and they were big underdogs. As we mentioned in the review, part of that had to do with drafts but the underdogs also played quite well in all four spots besides the 100 Thieves who honestly had no business winning that game. As mentioned on the podcast, I actually liked the dogs on this Sunday card before seeing yesterday anyway because the value was outstanding. Besides Dignitas, all four favorites on this card won yesterday which has given us a slight boost to the odds. EG moved up a tad from -215, 100Thieves up a bit from -155, and TSM swapped from -103 to -118 with FlyQuest.

I think you guys know where I'm going with this...

We're playing all four dogs today. We're not doing this because "it worked yesterday." My intention was to do this anyway because the value was right and we've got even more value now. To me, all four of these matches are very close anyway and should be much closer to even money than they are. FlyQuest are going to learn from their draft yesterday, 100 Thieves should have lost, Immortals and Golden Guardians got to watch other teams and learn, and EG took advantage of that weird FlyQuest draft while CLG looked to straight up outplay a linear defensive draft by Liquid. 

These lines shouldn't be where they are. Ton's of value on this board.

Moneyline: FlyQuest -103 (1.03 units)(5Dimes)
Moneyline: Immortals +118 (1 unit)(Nitrogen)
Moneyline: Golden Guardians +135 (1 unit)(Nitrogen)
Moneyline: CLG +181 (1 unit)(5Dimes)

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Parlays:

none today