Surviving 3k: Encouraging your allies to pick around you

Every match, you should be doing certain things:

1. determining how your team is going to communicate
2. assessing how flexible your team is going to be in roles, picks, and lanes
3. trying to convince your team to pick strong heroes, counterpick the enemy, and pick around the hero you want to play

There are many other things, but these 3 you can determine right at the start of the game. For the purpose of this post, let's focus on the last part of point 3. If at least one other person picks a hero that synergizes with what you pick, you multiply the effectiveness of both heroes thus increasing your chance of winning.

Surviving 3k means you need to use all your skills, not just DOTA related, to get that coveted MMR. If you play a great hero x and you know you pair well with hero y, then encourage someone to pick it if they're good with the hero. A few notes about this approach:

• Try a logical argument. for example, if the enemy team has a Storm Spirit and you want to play Omni, you could try: "Antimage counters storm and will play great with my Omniknight because you won't have to get a bkb."
• If the logical argument doesn't work, then try an emotional one. Generally, people make decisions based on emotion; how a decision makes you feel impacts greatly what you decide to do. With that said, most people will respond positively if you ask nicely, but some might respond if you are more aggressive. Caution: people tend to hide behind their anonymity on the internet so being aggressive isn't usually as successful as asking nicely. "You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar" is the old adage.
• Sometimes, no one plays a hero that partners well with you, like you want to play LC but no one picks heroes with burst damage.
• When some one says no to a line of reasoning, try another; sell your idea any way you can. Always keep in mind that the goal is gaining MMR, not making friends or enemies. If you happen to make those, that's fine too, but this is solo queue not social hour.
• Don't constrain your hero pairs to one that will only be in your lane or play a certain role. Try to harness the strength of your team's abilities using snap judgments and making quick decisions. If those decisions don't work after a couple tries, move on to something different.
• Don't get emotionally involved with a hero, hero pair or strategy. Being involved with your significant other is fine but this is, again, solo queue. There is work to do and whispering sweet nothings into your microphone isn't going to get you that +25 at the end of a match. If the game calls for something outside your comfort zone, do it. 
• On the other side of that coin: if your team wants you to pick a hero you aren't good at, try to find a compromise hero, otherwise tell them to pound sand. You are responsible for your destiny. If you're going to make it to 4k or 5k or whatever your goal is, you have to do it. Picking Techies with Tusk may sound like a good idea, but if you haven't played Tusk before, you will be a burden to be carries by someone else.

How do you determine what heroes to pair with? Make sure to check your dotabuff and see what heroes you pair well with. You should be spamming between 3-5 heroes in solo queue (another post for another time) and will therefore build up stats related to those heroes. With those stats you can make more informed decisions about playing the game, include what heroes you pair well with.

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.

Surviving 3k: just counterpick them already

The pub meta is driven by the most popular heroes. While win rates generally correlate to popularity, Pudge is super popular but his win rate is about 50% so there isn't necessarily a general causation there; some people just have favorite heroes they like to play alot. Surviving 3k MMR has a lot to do with using picks to compensate for the wide range in skill. A lot of people resist the idea of picking hero flavors of the month and counterpicking those flavors because, again, some people just have favorite heroes they like to play alot. Well that needs to change. Stop picking your favorite heroes and counterpick your opponent already.

If your goal is to get better at DOTA and improve your MMR, then counterpicking offers a direct path to do this. Counterpicking nudges who has the advantage in your favor. Even though Wraithking may not be your jam, he gives Bloodseeker the third lowest win rating so picking a WK into BS is going to give your team a few percentage points in your favor. This is crucial. Games are generally close and the higher you get in MMR, the closer they become. The closer games become, the more important your hero decision becomes because it offers a way to gain an advantage.

How do you counterpick properly? I usually just go to dotabuff heroes section, find the hero I keep losing too, and see which heroes are recommended against them and which heroes give them a lower win rate. It's that easy. It's also useful to know how they generally itemize. Items like black king bar or butterfly can swing in their favor if you aren't prepared.

Personally, I have been having trouble with Bloodseeker. He's everywhere and has a really high win percentage. Having explored different strategies, Ursa has worked well for me because of damage mitigation and the burst damage Ursa offers. Plus he's aggressive around the same time that Bloodseeker is. You don't play Ursa in the jungle against the BS.

What heroes are you having trouble with? How are you trying to deal with them? Let me know in the comments.