Surviving 3k: Making the best of your picks by predicting lanes

Radiant

VS

Dire

I'm sure many of you have experienced a game like I experienced on Radiant a few days ago:
- some one randoms a hero first pick (Tinker in this case)
- the Windranger is set on playing mid
- everyone else picks hoping the Windranger isn't going mid.
- the Windranger refuses to switch lanes

How should you handle this situation? there are many ways to approach it, so lets run through some of the options.

1. You can try to bully the Windranger into going to another lane through having the Tinker or another hero go mid with her. There is a Tusk, so depending on how the dire lane, and specifically send middle, there might be kill potential for a roaming Tusk who spends a lot of time mid.

• Pros: shutdown enemy mid, potentially snowball (no pun intended) the Windranger into fast Aghs
• Cons: The Windranger ruins your game because she's mad, you don't get kills on the enemy heroes because they lane strongly and end up with under-farmed and -leveled heroes

2. Aggro Trilane with the Tusk, Nyx, and Ursa, send the Tinker solo safelane against, hopefully, a Darkseer, and let the WR do her thing. Snowball into Nyx stun plus Ursa damage should be a kill the majority of the time against a solo or dual lane.

• Pros: Crystal maiden is an easy support hero to snowball and kill (low movespeed) if they solo support. If the Razor safelanes and gets shut down, the carry potential of the other team is drastically reduced, especially for pushing. Happy WR. Tinker gets some farm and levels.
• Cons: fighting all the time in the enemy safelane means that your heroes will potentially be low, powering up the Bloodseeker. The risk of him snowballing out of control and taking over the game means you will probably lose. Also, Nyx and Tusk need levels (most importantly, level 6) to be effective. If your aggro tri doesn't get kills, you end up with under-leveled and under-farmed heroes who have little catch up potential.

3. Put the Ursa in the jungle and have Tusk or Nyx support the Tinker. This is the greediest option because you're allowing the offlane hero to get more level and experience than he should get. This will be especially hard for a Tusk or Nyx to zone a Darkseer because Ion Shell is so strong early in the game and those heroes are both melee.

• Pros: the enemy team has a potentially greedy lineup so trading a jungle Ursa for a potential jungle BS is a good trade (Ursa matches up well against the BS). Happy WR. Tinker gets some farm. Offlane gets levels.
• Cons: jungling against a BS takes a lot of finesse; the lower the Ursa gets, the faster the BS jungles closing the gap in advantage the Ursa has. Having either Tusk or Nyx solo support isn't ideal, especially against a DS, If Nyx does support, his impact on the game is minimal. You aren't punishing the enemy team's greed in any way.

While there are other option that aren't mentioned here, a lot of it comes down to predicting your opponents lanes. Because people are playing so greedy this patch, it seemed obvious to me that the CM would support top with a little jungle mixed in, the DS would be offlane, and that Razor would be safelane. This leave Lina and the BS to either go mid and jungle or support and mid, respectively. I predicted, correctly, that the BS would jungle and Lina would mid so I convinced my team, apart from the WR, to go with option 3 and putting Nyx in the offlane. Here's how it panned out:

This game is illustrative of how to make the most of your picks in pubs through predicting how the other team is going to lane. Even if you don't initially predict how the other team is going to lane, just switch up your lanes to give your team the best chance of winning. For example, if the enemy team had gone for a CM, Lina and Razor aggro Trilane, then the Tinker would need to move to the top lane in order to get his farm. Otherwise he risks dying to the three enemy heroes. It's also worth mentioning that a trilane isn't the only way that the enemy could have punished the random Tinker pick. But they didn't punish us so we won.

When it comes down to it, DOTA is about getting the enemy thrown. It doesn't matter how you get it as long as you do. Making the best of your picks for the laning stage is the first step in doing that. The next things to consider are making the most of your picks in mid-game and securing an end-game.

*Special thanks to www.dotabuff.com for the pictures found in this post.