The Dota 2 Professional League is one of the most hyped events of Chinese Dota. The competition hosts some of the most recognized teams of the region. Let’s have a look at one of the matches.
iG vs Newbee (December 8, 2018, Dota2 Professional League Season 6, Best of Two)
The reason we have picked this match for you is that if this match was played out a couple of years ago then it would have been the talk of the entire community of Dota 2, Newbee vs Invictus Gaming. But now it is the battle of arguably two of the weakest teams of the region. So, it will be a good practice for us to see which side is the worst of the two.
Invictus Gaming
2018 has been quite unfortunate for the Chinese region. The teams of the region haven’t had any impact in the 2017-2018 DPC and one of the teams that have lost its legacy is Invictus Gaming. In 2018 The International the team was amongst the few teams that were eliminated in the group stage of the competition. This meant that the team needed a complete rework and that exactly what happened. The organization parted ways from the entire roster of the team. However, even after this remodeling, the team continued to display disappointing results. Since they failed to get to The Kuala Lumpur Major and 2018 ESL One Hamburg.
After failing to participate in these competitions, the team again made a couple of changes to the roster, which saw Yang InJuly Xiaodong and Zheng ghost Jie leaving the colors of Invictus Gaming. They were replaced by Linh doodle Zikai and Jian XuaN Weishan who previously played for Echo Gaming. This duo was in the 2015 lineup of Invictus Gaming.
With the former duo of ghost and InJuly, Invictus Gaming had a decent month of September 2018. In the Asia Pro League, they managed to get a 3rd place finish. But this decent performance was not good enough to get them through the to the minor and major of the new season. This might have played a big role in their elimination from the roster. But this impatience of the management towards the roster shows how little faith Invictus Gaming has in its own players.
Newbee
Since the end of the TI7, Newbee has been in complete shambles. The Veteran side of Chinese region was quite dominant in the first half of 2017. Even in the TI7, Newbee made its way to the grand finals. However, after that the same team was beaten by almost everyone in the 2017-2018 season. In the 2018 ESL One Genting, they showed some signs of restoration. But who could have thought that winning the ESL One Genting would be the only big accomplishment of the team in the entire calendar year? Apart from the problems in the game, the side of Newbee had also problems in the management, which could attribute to their in-game problems. Their owner was charged with fraud and corruption. However, soon after that, the team got a partnership with Intel, the giants of modern computing. However, even after the partnership, the team failed to produce good results which can be summed up by their performance of TI8. At TI8, the grand finalists of TI7 finished at the 13th-16th place, which just shows how disappointing the 2017-2018 has been for the team.
After this disastrous result, two experienced players of the team, KaKa and kpii left the team. The Newbie side took no time to sign new players, however, these signings have not delivered any decent results. In the new season so far, the side has not qualified for any DPC competition. Even in the qualifiers of their own region’s major, Chongqing, the side was beaten, 2-1 by For The Team in the semis. After that, a week ago, Newbee failed to qualify for the Bucharest Minor, getting beaten by Team Ever. These results just exhibit, how much the team has fallen in terms of quality. This is a quite disastrous start for the team that is looking to get direct qualification for TI. They have no way to get the results they need to get them a hope of getting a single DPC point. If Newbee don’t turn things around soon they might lose some other stars including their formidable mid-laner Sccc which may result in unrecoverable consequences for the Newbee team.
Newbee might be able to change their fortunes in this upcoming game since they will be facing another team that is now a shadow of its former self, Invictus Gaming.
Final Verdict
None of these two teams have shown even signs of decent performance. Both Invictus and Newbee were amongst the biggest threats to some of the best teams in the world. Now both of them can’t even win against tier 2 teams. In the Dota 2 Professional League Season 6, both have not shown any signs of improvement. Invictus is yet to win a single game of the competition. While Newbee has got a single win. Both teams don’t have any profound strategy and it looks like that both of them are just playing in the dark with no clue whatsoever about how to get the victory.
From both of these struggling teams, we think the Invictus is the worse team since they have no chemistry whatsoever. The constant changes to the roster Have truly left them vulnerable. Newbee team has also its fair share of struggles but they have shown faith in their players, which could be enough to get them the victory in this encounter. Three of their players have been playing for almost two years now. So this could get them the most needed edge in this meeting. The new 7.20d could get the team the victory since no one knows about the current meta and this could possibly play in favor of the odds of Newbee.
Newbee 2 – 0 Invictus Gaming
Odds on bookmakers
Bookmakers | Newbee Odds | Draw Odds | iG Odds | |||
European | American | European | American | European | American | |
GG.bet | 1.67 | -149 | 2.57 | +157.00 | 6.93 | +593.00 |
Shehryar is a professional eSports analyst with a particular affinity for CS:GO, LoL, and DOTA. He covers major eSports events across the world for WagerBop.
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