As a newer player, absolutely not. Your knowledge isn’t big enough to understand most of the decisions they’re making. If you are watching things like vod reviews were experts are going over players/decisions and explaining them in detail (impossible to do in a live-cast), you might get some useful info.

But watching proplay gets you quite a bit of gamesense if you have a decent base-knowledge beforehand.

This is the lovechild of Aphelios and Dota 2’s Invoker.

Salary cap and players’ value skyrocketing after this tournament will almost surely break this roster apart. Faker and Oner are the only certainties at the moment.

It was a pleasure to write this article and series throughout the week. You can check the rest of the pieces on ESH, if you’re interested. I had a lot of stats and Pick/Ban points for this one, but I got carried away on the frankly never-ending narrative points. Here’s a few:

- A rivalry 7 years in the making. Xiaohu’s first match against Faker was in 2016!

- Both players have a shadow of their past (distant or recent) that they’re trying to leave behind here. Faker has been on a hot-streak of Finals losses that has started to look like a curse. Xiaohu has never beaten Faker in a Worlds Knockout stage (neither has any other LPL team, to be fair).

- Xiaohu is one (if not the) best player to never win Worlds. This might be his last chance, especially with how chaotic and unpredictable the LPL is.

- Faker hasn’t won an International tournament since 2017. With most of T1’s contracts running out this off-season, it’s hard to picture him getting a better chance than this.

And much more! Their story leading to here is really interesting. I hope you enjoy it :D

Great tricast choice.

I’m glad they actually showed it transparently this time. I think it is a mistake to give T1 red side, and I don’t think WBG can use blue as well as JDG. R5 counter pick for TheShy sounds like the biggest win-con they can have this series, but we’ll see.

Kanavi’s fumbles are fresh, but I still think that his missclicked Magical Journey into T1’s mid turret was the beginning of the end for JDG’s hopes.