This article is part of a series written for the ONE Esports Singapore Major by illustrious Dota 2 statsman, Ben “Noxville” Steenhuisen.
Yesterday, we revealed the fan power rankings for teams in the Upper Bracket, but since they were made so long ago and with such limited information it didn’t feel right to hold the fans firmly to their outdated predictions.
Now that we’ve seen all the teams play at the event, we’re able to simulate the event using a combination of fan predictions, tournament game results, and existing skill metrics for the team based on their regional play (with regional normalization based on the games we’ve seen).
We do this in a 10^6 iteration Monte Carlo simulation, playing hypothetical tournaments and noting down where the teams placed. We’ll keep this updated each day so you can follow how the odds for each team shift around.
It’s no surprise that Team Secret tops our prediction board to win. They showed that the EU region wasn’t going to be a total disaster – knocking the young guns Thunder Predator down into the lower bracket.
All the Upper Bracket teams are massive favorites but this is because they simply have way fewer games to play if they want to win the event – just two more wins puts them in the finals, and even if they lose one of those they can come through the lower bracket. The Upper Bracket teams are also guaranteed a top six finish so there are simply fewer possible outcomes for them.
If anything, the implied probabilities of the simulation likely undervalue the power of a lower bracket run from teams like Vici or VP – although any of the four Upper Bracket teams who drop down into Lower Bracket Round 3 will be a formidable roadblock for them. If their true skill is just a bit better than our initial model suggests then their expected probabilities to reach the finals could spike up to a few percent.
Quincy Crew and Neon are favorites to be knocked out this round. In Neon’s case it’s a team they know well, Fnatic, in their path – whereas for Quincy Crew it’s an unfamiliar foe, Virtus.pro, who awaits them.
In both cases the journey doesn’t magically become a lot easier if they win today – the Lower Bracket is totally stacked with top-quality teams so every round will be a challenge.
Noxville runs Datdota and is a software architect at esports data company, Bayes Esports. Follow him on Twitter.
