posted by joinDOTA Staff,
Dan Offen, our master of podcasts, returns to his roots and decided to make short, funny summaries for every team competing at TI. This is part two:

Ninjas in Pyjamas



As the host of a popular DOTA 2 interview podcast, I occasionally come into possession of hot scoops – and my hot scoop regarding PPD is that he is a man who gets up very early in the morning and responds to emails very promptly. Sorry to let you know that that bad boy of NA Dota is such a responsible, reasonable man.

Ninjas in Pyjamas have the vibe of a team that is run like a business. The players clock in and out and have good working relationships but know nothing about each others personal lives. They say things like “another day another dollar” before going into games. Their performance review for the year would be “meets expectations”, they’ve won two minors and come fourth in a major, “that’ll do for me” says ppd to 33 in front of the watercooler, “doing anything over the weekend?” “I’m taking the kids to the see The Emoji Movie 2.”

My other hot Ninja in Pyjamas scoops are that when I met Martin 'Saksa' Sazdov I thought “this man is an absurd gargantuan freak, a monstrous giant of a man” and then he turned out to be slightly shorter than me.

TNC Predator



I like to think that TNC Predator's poor reaction to their scandal late last year was the result of their management strategy closely echoing the way the team plays in game. TNC play like a barbarian in his first ever game of DND, who's only reaction to any situation is to rage, and then charge into it head first. Nobody playing for TNC has ever said “lets stop to think about this” or “is that really a good idea?”

So when Carlo 'Kuku' Palad was accused of using racial slurs in a pub game their TNC office probably sprung into action, denials and twists of truth blinking onto social media pages like a Queen of Pain into an unwarded dire jungle.

Heen has been a stabilising influence on the team, his contribution that of reminding Armel to check to see if his shoes are tied before he runs into the road to chase a butterfly. He can't make him check left or right for oncoming trucks, but if he can stop him tripping up on route to being flattened he'll have done a good job.

OG



OG left the last International with one of the best narratives in DOTA history. Players departing on short notice, a returning coach, a promising unknown, a victory against all odds. They were a team propelled to victory by the sheer power of the story behind them – Apollo urging them to victory, intervene in their right clicks and their spellcasting. Truly, OG winning the Aegis pleased the gods.

This year, they’ve got nothing. “Ana went home for a bit and we tried out a few players but they didn’t work out, so he came back – and then Sebastien 'Ceb' Debs was rude about some Russians but apologised comprehensibly and everybody ended up friends?” Piss off OG, try harder. If you want to retain the Aegis you’re going to have to dig deeper than that.

I want Icefrog to remove Earth Spirit from captains mode and Jesse 'JerAx' Vainikka to retaliate by posting his true identity on LinkedIn.

I want the violence that lies hidden just behind Topson’s eyes to burst out in a rampage reminiscent of the end of Carrie when Kyle 'Kyle' Freedman criticises his invoker play following a group stage loss to Infamous.

I want the whole team to be incapacitated following a shared psychotic delusion that Somnus’s Kunka has taken corporal form, and for Titouan 'Sockshka' Merloz to have to play all five positions on the team simultaneously.

If you want results, OG, you’ve got to go the extra mile. Make it happen.

Alliance



Looking at the outpouring of emotion that followed Alliance’s qualification for TI at EPICENTER Major, it was hard not feel sorry for Vici Gaming, who’s second major win of the season received absolutely no fan-fair at all, with everybody claiming that the ‘real’ finals of the event came in the lower-bracket third round. The equivalent of when your little cousins’ tuneless tooting on a recorder receives more attention and praise from your extended family at the get-together than the complex piano piece you’ve been working on for this very occasion. I am not bitter.

But I was happy for Alliance too, because by all accounts they’re really nice boys, if your teenaged daughter (or son, I’m not presuming anything) brought home any of the Alliance team as a new boyfriend, you’d take an instant shine to them. Long after the relationship collapsed you’d ask your, now older and sadder, child “hey, whatever happened to that INSaNIA? He was a nice boy, you should give him a call.”

They’d sigh: “We just grew apart, Dad.” And they’d roll their eyes and the rest of dinner would be awkward.

Keen Gaming



If there’s one beneficiary of just three teams snaffling up all of the Major wins and EG taking three 3rd places, it’s Keen – who’s largely underwhelming season in which they only qualified for two majors, and who’s best placing was 5th, has still granted them almost double the number of points of the next highest contender, AS Monaco Gambit.

From what I remember about Keen Gaming’s run at the DreamLeague Season 11 Major, they won the matches they did through a style of play I’d describe as being “unhinged”. They played full contact, aggressive, crazy DOTA and they confused EG enough to scrape a 2-1 upperbracket and then immediately collapsed, spluttering and spent, and lost their next two series 2-0.

Out of all of the teams who have played 100 games, Keen have the shortest game length at just 32 minutes at 59 seconds. That’s a full minute thirty less than the next shortest team, OG. These guys do not mess around, you won’t see anybody in their practice room with stacks of DOTA, instead a man in a puffa jacket comes in bearing some dubious white powder, and Keen Gaming are good to go.

I mean, all power to them, but it must make the teams who grinded and worked for their points like Alliance feel like they could have instead just played like a Mad Max War Boy who’s just sprayed himself in the face for three games and qualified for TI, albeit ravaged by the effects of solvent abuse.

That said, I am fully on board with Keen Gaming absolutely shit-housing their way to a TI victory. They’re the Leicester City FC of DOTA, Old chicken as Jamie Vardy and dark as Kante. Stranger things have happened.

RNG



The problem with naming your team something like Royal Never Give Up is that it sets out the values and objectives of the team at first glance. If you were to ask somebody what the values of Virtus.pro are, going just from their name, you’d probably get a vague hazy answer something along the lines of “they like winning and doing well”, which to be fair are values that Virtus.pro have the decency to stick to.

Royal Never Give Up, on the other hand are frauds and their coach Super! and captain Zhi Cheng 'LaNm' Zhang should be arrested and thrown in jail.

For the majority of top teams, when looking at the length of games, the values of the won games are lower than the values of the lost games. For OG, for example, in their won games they on average spend 32 minutes and 45 seconds playing. However, when looking at the games they lose, they spend an average of 36 minutes and 58 seconds. There’s a certain degree of tenacity there, a sense that OG as a team believe that they can win any game and that they will not give up.

With Royal Never Give up, a team who are named after the principle of never giving up, these values are reversed. On average, they tend to spend 50 more seconds in won games than lost. Out of all of the teams who qualified to TI9 only Virtus.pro, who astonishingly spent almost a full 2 minutes less in lost games than won, are more prone to giving up.

Frankly, I think Royal Never Give Up should be disqualified for the International and their spot should be given to a team who have the decency to stick their the values embodied in their name, like Team Aster (the definition of Aster as a suffix means “poor quality”).

Photo credit: Valve

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