This article is part of our Dota 2 series.
In just a little over seven days, The International 2018 group stage will begin. With the lack of Purge and Merlini videos to help guide you through the compendium predictions, I'm going to step in and do my best to earn you some sweet Battle Pass points. Starting off will be the Tournament Predictions as those are the most boring and the most straightforward. Most anyone can comb through the data and come up with a decent guess at the tournament predictions so that's what I aim to do. I'll be trying to look at events as close to The International as possible in an effort to have my predictions be in line with the current meta, but I will also be looking further back and to The International 2017 looking for possible outliers and to help keep my predictions in line with the idea that The International isn't always like other tournaments.
As a disclaimer, I once snowballed my team into a Chronosphere, followed up by a Black Hole which resulted in a complete team wipe, so don't think you can't disagree with me, because I definitely make some bad decisions. With that being said, let's get started!
Total number of Games Played at the Main Event:
This one was difficult as no event really has the same format so it is hard to judge based on past events. The China Dota2 Supermajor's format most closely resembles that of The International, with the exception that the Lower Bracket Round 1 was best-of-three and the International's will be best-of-one. The Supermajor had 56 games played in total with that best-of-three in the Lower Bracket Round 1, and even though The International will be best-of-one, I think that there are better teams who will play better Dota, so the numbers will be close. With that being said you can either select 50 to 54 or 55 to 60 for this category, so while I think the numbers will be close to the Supermajor I think the 50 to 54 selection gives us the best chance of being correct.
Author's Prediction: 50 to 54
Total number of heroes Picked:
Grab that knob and crank it up to 11, The Summit 9 had 86 unique heroes picked over 44 games. Given how short the Summit was and how many heroes a small amount of teams managed to work through in that time, I feel pretty strongly that The International will have 101+ unique heroes picked before the tournament is over. There will be even more teams, even more games and nobody should be holding anything back. Although TI can sometimes create its own meta, I think we should see plenty of different heroes.
Author's Prediction: 101+
Total number of heroes Banned:
Usually, the number of heroes banned is slightly less than the number of heroes picked, mostly due to a handful of heroes always taking up the early ban slots and only getting through occasionally.
Author's Prediction: 91-100
Most Combined Total Kills in a game:
Despite having a handful of teams at The International whose games tend to run long, the kills don't necessarily continue to rack up. Instead, the kills tend to taper off as death timers get longer and the stakes get higher. Even though there have been some high kill games in the past couple of tournaments, it seems unlikely that were going to get a game where both teams have around 50 kills each.
Author's Prediction: 81-90
Longest game of the tournament:
As previously stated, there are a lot of teams in this tournament that have a tendency to run a little long with their game times. Fnatic can often run into some long games and, of course, the Chinese teams often run a little longer than the western teams. It seems likely that two teams with a tendency to drag out the game will face one another. I wouldn't count on seeing something like Cloud9 v SFZ but I think that two teams will make it over the 100-minute mark.
Author's Prediction: 100:00+
Shortest game of the tournament:
The first year I did Compendium Predictions for The International I thought no way would a team win a game in under 15 minutes, but sure enough, some team managed to come in just under the wire and ruin my day. Every year since I have always predicted a sub-15 minute game and every year I have been wrong, WELL NOT THIS YEAR! That being said, Virtus.Pro and Team Liquid are likely going to make short work of some poor team that gets thrown into the ring against them, so there is likely to be a sub-20 minute game.
Author's Prediction: 15:00 - 19:59
Most Kills by a hero in a game:
There are some hyper-aggressive teams in this tournament who tend to rack up the kills, think Pain Gaming vs Fnatic from the Summit 9. With a tournament as big as The International there are bound to be games where two teams like this meet or one of these teams faces off against a squad that's just good enough to prolong the game while continuing to be slaughtered by an opposing hero.
Author's Prediction: 26+
Most Deaths by a hero in a game:
One important thing to remember about predictions is to remember that certain categories are not always directly related to another. Even though we have said that someone is probably going to get 26+ kills in one game and that games are going to go on for a long time, that doesn't mean that all those kills are going to come up against one person. One person could have 25 kills and each member of the enemy team only have five deaths so it is much more likely that, kind of like bans relates to picks, one player will die just a little bit less than the max number of kills.
Author's Prediction: 15 to 17
Most Assists by a hero in a game:
Again, this is a tournament that is likely to have some seriously long games, has highly aggressive teams and, spoiler alert for a future article in this series, there are several teams with player who like Zeus. Crank that knob all the way up and break it off because there are no breaks on the Assist train, Choo Choo!
Author's Prediction: 36+
Highest GPM by a hero in a game:
This section always boils down to one thing, do you think that a hero like Alchemist, Anti-Mage, Medusa etc. is going to have a long enough game or a big enough game to break that big mark. For this years International I know two things, Resolut1on is going to do Resolut1on things again in the carry role and ana loves him some Alchemist. I think the odds are in favor of someone breaking the 1000 GPM mark once.
Author's Prediction: 1000+
I will be tackling the Teams section of the Compendium Predictions next, so if you found this article helpful be sure to keep your eyes open for the rest of the articles in this series.
