Dota 2 is the best game ever made and I can’t imagine my life without it. I want to thank Tundra Esports, my players, and Valve. Thanks for the amazing journey and making this all possible. I think there’s been a lot of negativity in the discourse surrounding the game lately, but I want to highlight the uniqueness of the Dota 2 ecosystem, how cool it is, and what a good game Dota 2 really is.
TI5
At TI5 it felt like I didn’t win the right way. Maybe it was because I got kicked after lul. I don’t mean this as an insult to the team and I enjoyed watching Sumail 1x9, but we didn’t build a dota team together–it was more like a business oriented group of really high skilled players. I don’t think it was a bad way for a team to operate, but my dream back then was to win on the c9 roster, where I had learned most of my Dota ideas. The Tundra team this year felt different compared to TI5 EG in terms of team identity and how we won. There were a lot of collaborative ideas and I’m incredibly proud to have watched the players grow into a TI winning team. I hope they don’t kick me xd. I’m not sure if I fully consider this a 2nd TI win, because the process and the emotions of coaching and playing are very different, but of course I’ll take it.
Fata kick
One thing I want to address is the Fata kick that occurred earlier in the year. Roster changes are hard. The players and I decided to not talk about the direct reasons for the kick publicly because that kind of discussion tends to become extremely toxic/negative. However, I do want to clear up some misconceptions. Fata did not save Sney’s slot on the roster only for Sney to turn around and kick him. This just did not happen and I don’t know where it came from. I don’t even know how that would work in terms of team dynamic for Sney, as he would be playing with three people who tried to kick him. What happened was that two players approached me and stated their concerns regarding Fata. At that point in time, I was relatively new to the team as their coach and the players had been together much longer, so I told them that I would support the decision if all the other teammates agreed. The four team mates then talked and came to a unanimous decision. Saksa was then confirmed to be available and willing to join, so we brought the desire to change the roster to the org, which, while unhappy, chose to support the team’s decision. Roster changes are never easy, but ultimately sometimes necessary. Even now Sney doesn’t want to say anything, because he says it’ll make Fata feel bad if we address it, but I’m sick of the comments about Sney betraying Fata to save himself because they aren’t true.
Psychologist
We started working with Dan before the 3rd DPC season (https://twitter.com/DanAbrahams77) and he helped us a lot this TI. The main reason we wanted to get a psychologist was because we thought we were the best team at the Stockholm major, but we choked due to the crowd and mental pressure. Dan brought us to the next level by helping us develop good mental frameworks and tools for mental preparation, as well as helping us learn how to reset from losses. It’s a testament to his work that during TI we always bounced back and never lost a 2nd game in any series. We ended up over focusing on some psych concepts for Arlington and Riyadh, as we were starting with conscious incompetence there, but everything turned very smooth as we reached unconscious competence (see previous blog with 4 stages of learning). Dan was an integral part of our success this TI and clearly demonstrated the impact a sports psychologist can have in esports.
This years dpc system
While I had done some light, unofficial coaching work with Tundra before TI10, they officially brought me in as their coach for the TI11 DPC circuit. I was not involved in the TI10 circuit and had no idea how gruelling the system was. I am so glad it’s being changed for next year as the previous DPC format had a multitude of problems. For me, the biggest ones are the length of each tour and the lack of games. There were only seven potential points last season, so there were always a lot of tiebreakers. This also meant that every game mattered an insane amount, so teams had to be fully “on” for a seven week bootcamp in competitive regions. I would have felt less stressed playing double the games in half the time or even like bo2s against each team into a bo1 madness week at the end. Also Europe’s dpc next year is sort of insane. In order to stay in division one, you have to beat a team that placed 9–12th at TI and only lost to other European teams in the playoffs. And that’s just to stay in division one, not even to qualify for the major. Anyways, I hope next season’s system will be better and have more 3rd party tournaments for LAN experience.
Finding my place as coach
When you initially join a team as a coach or player, you bring a different idea of dota and team identity to the team, so it’s really easy to identify weak points and teach each other quickly. However, as time goes on, your ideas about the game start to merge with the rest of the team’s, which leads to coaches having less direct impact. I think this will be a big challenge for me going into next season as coach. When I first joined tundra, the players were all really high skill and smart, and my main role was to mediate conflict and combine their ideas. There’s always some focus on learning Dota from the coaches perspective, but I think that coaching in Dota is really weird. Almost every coach in Dota is a lot worse than their players and dota is a very knowledge based game. This means that even with comparative advantage–i.e. someone 1k lower might be better at using tp scrolls than his overall better counterpart and can help with that specifically–it’s awkward to have a coach be solely in charge of your full Dota team identity. While coaches are really important outside of gameplay, it’s always been weird to have a worse Dota player in charge of team gameplay. Therefore, I’ve found that coaches in Dota should be more collaborative than authoritarian. Much of a coach’s value comes from being an outside set of eyes, the ability to settle disputes, and the ability to combine team ideas. Dota’s robust replay system also allows you to steal other player’s knowledge spikes and add them to your team’s accumulated knowledge. Some key personal examples of this from past TIs are TI5 CDEC enemy safelane pressure, TI6 wings 2 lane control, TI7 Liquid’s early game fighting items and collapsing mid, etc.
I found a really good rhythm while I was working with the first roster, and imo had a lot of impact, but I wasn’t able to find a good balance. We developed a bit of coach dependency, and it led to me feeling burnt out after one season. For example, when a scrim would end, all five players would msg me instead of talking to each other, and while I wanted the players to talk to me a lot I didn’t want to be the first or only option for all our problem solving. I learned a lot from the first DPC season about balancing my work load and finding a better team communication system. I ended up creating a code of conduct and established rules to combat some pitfalls of past teams I’ve been in. For example, one rule that I really liked was that players should not talk to each other about another player. You either work directly with the player there’s an issue with or you talk to the coach about it. The coach will help you vent or frame your thoughts better in order to work with both parties to come to a solution. This rule was set up because in the past, internal non-direct team talks have led to fiendy flame sessions and tribalism/cliques occurring within the team, both of which don’t result in problem solving oriented discussions.
Roster changes as coach
Any chaos in team dynamic, including roster changes, present a challenge for coaches. Although a lot of teams and coaches have honeymoon periods when they first form or change rosters, dynamic changes cause previous systems to break down. It can be difficult to rebuild said systems to identify and solve team problems, and every team is going to have problems, especially when aiming to improve. A lot of coaching in Dota revolves around finding, solving, or preempting team problems. Generally I think people make roster changes for the wrong reasons, and even if you make a change, it often won’t solve the problems you hope it will. Usually a team’s problems are a lot deeper than the problem the roster change was intended to solve.
I ended up feeling lower impact during Dubai and the Stockholm major due to the chaos the roster change caused in our team dynamic, even though we did well at those tournaments. Of course I gave my thoughts on the draft, looked at mistakes and tournament trends, but I was weak on the mental side. Unfortunately the mental side becomes more important later on in tournaments and was ultimately our downfall. We got lucky and had a good team dynamic after the roster switch, but this actually made it harder for me to find my place as coach. You can always work on fundamentals, as they’re easy to cover (communication, lanes, draft, coordination), but when everything feels good on the surface, it’s often hard to find the underlying problems — even more so when stuff feels good but you are losing at tournaments (Riyadh Arlington).
Progression as coach
I’ve always been a very micro oriented player. This has been a blessing and a curse; finding a balance of nitpicking and adding macro level things, without making players over focus on anything, has been a constant battle for me. I finally found a good spot as a coach going towards TI bootcamp by identifying how to help each player best and focusing on how to combine their ideas. For example, Skiter and I watched every lane and early game together and that produced really good results. This was because when Skiter’s fundamentals are solid, the game becomes very clear for him, and he can focus on making calls we can play around. We also had some mentality shifts towards focusing on how to make our own strategies work rather than reacting to our opponents strats.
Something else that I’ve struggled with is the negativity that comes from going over your own plays and mistakes. I learned how important it is to positively reinforce good plays and watch other teams play to learn from both their good plays and mistakes. I also had a problem with confirmation bias, as it was much easier to see things that I already knew. For example, when reflecting on my own play, when a lane shove led to good map movement, it was very clear to me,while comparatively when a good smoke hit on the enemy carry it wasn’t as clear. Honestly, it’s pretty hard for me to learn completely new concepts from replays unless there’s some idea going in, which is why I think a lot of Dota is about accumulated knowledge–most of what I learn is based on some other foundation from before and is built up.
Every past TI I felt like I was lacking some key experience and skills as a coach. I still am, but I feel like the team makes up for a lot of my shortcomings and I just don’t know what I need to learn next yet. Some of the things I learned coaching past TIs were:
TI6 Secret was a rough coaching stint, but it was my first one and helped me think about being more positive, larger scale, and how to find impact. I think that if I focused more on conflict resolution for that team I could have had a lot of impact, but instead I did some useless stuff.
TI8 Fnatic I learned to be more direct with problems on the team and facilitating conversations that will mould an actual team, rather than having people bottle up problems and things they want to change. I also learned a lot about drafting ideas on this team and how to try to highlight players strengths and cover for weaknesses.
TI9 Newbee I learned to try to let players feel more free, which was my overcompensation of what I took from TI8, how to improve the mental side of the game, and how to deal with losses in tournaments. I talked about this before, but I didn’t really know how to reset the players after losing games in tournament series, specifically after we lost games in the TI lower bracket. I also tried to find a better balance and not over focus on parts of the game/force my Dota ideal too much.
Overall, Tundra was a really easy team to coach. I guess it’s easy to say after you win, but the environment was really conducive for learning and people were always hungry to improve. Furthermore, the players had really good fundamentals and foundations, so whenever I brought something up it was easy to talk about. Some of the bigger adjustments needed replays and repetition, but for the vast majority of things, I could just tell a player to consider something and it would happen over the next couple of days. The team was also very trusting and welcoming to new ideas, so if I told people about something weird, they would be willing to try it and see the results. However, the biggest thing that made coaching Tundra easy was that the players themselves were very active in bringing new ideas and concepts to me. All I had to do was bring those ideas to the rest of the team. Some examples of this are the branch starting builds from 33, how Skiter wants his timings to be used, and how Saksa wants to play the map.
As I mentioned previously, coaching in Dota is weird because the players are a lot better than the coach at dota, especially on the heroes that they play. For example, I had no clue how broodmother worked this patch so I needed 33 to talk about the hero and what it needs to be strong. We took what he learned in pubs to try it in scrims and figured out the good/bad matchups and what heroes we wanted with brood. The same went for most of the weird heroes my team plays except for Tundra Nine’s pool where he would have zero games on a hero and just feel it. The other thing that I really appreciated about Tundra was that the team was also really big on personal responsibility; they were by far the hardest working team I’ve been a part of.
Ti bootcamp + bleed house
We were deciding between Singapore and Thailand for TI bootcamp as 33 cannot go into Malaysia with an Israeli passport. Thailand’s downside was that the internet might not have been as stable plus higher ping and Singapore’s was that it was a lot more expensive. The org eventually decided to do Singapore, which I’m really grateful for, as my experience at the bootcamp was amazing. There was only one problem, which happened when we first arrived at the hotel in SG where our bootcamp was being held. The room we were given was beside the industrial AC for the hotel and the noise levels made playing impossible. I felt really panicked when this happened, but Tundra casually managed to find us a different set up in one day, and it happened to be the nicest bootcamp I’ve participated in in my 11 years of pro scene involvement.
We bootcamped at the Bleed esports house in singapore. I think they’re getting a Dota 2 roster for next season, which is really hype, as I think they’re an up and coming SEA organisation. The house was spacious, had good access to food, and was in a good area of the city for walking. There was also a clutch couch area for players to chill in, so the bootcamp didn’t feel like a forced dota labour area. Every Dota 2 bootcamp has some conflict as you try to find your own Dota and improve, but I think the good bootcamp settings allowed us to focus and resolve most of the problems. I was really happy with the progression that the conflict led to, as despite often being perceived negatively, conflict is also usually the driving force behind change and improvement. We also had a general shift of mentality towards conflicts and losses as part of the journey rather than things we must avoid. At the end of our bootcamp we even had a couple of rough days, but we were able to not only move past them, but learn from them. Without those rough days and the team talks that came from them, there’s no way we would have gotten into our TI11 form.
A general day at our bootcamp would be something like this: all six of us would meet in the morning to start our day together. Some of us would eat hotel breakfast, and the other ones with working brains would walk to the hawker centre across from our hotel and get chicken rice and hawker breakfast foods (more people grew brains and joined as the bootcamp went on). We would then meet up at the house, play pubs and set a time to go for a walk together before scrims. During or after this walk we would talk about what we wanted to focus on for the day and how to make any ideas work. After that we did replay review. We played two sets of scrims a day–sometimes three–and maintained a heavy emphasis on personal improvement and playing pubs. Then we’d taxi back to the hotel and the smart people would visit the hawker centre again. We also did some team activities like playing cards now and then and set a free day once a week for mental reset.
I also want to say that I loved singapore. As I said before, every morning and night at the bootcamp I would walk to the hawker centre across our hotel and eat chicken rice and other foods. It was insanely cheap and delicious. Although this TI had some of the best food options available, during the tournament we would go to the mall food court two or three times a day to eat chicken rice and pepper beef because it was so good and cheap. I’m certain that value adds flavour. Everything in Singapore was mega clean and everyone was so polite. The only downside of Singapore to me was the climate, which was too hot and humid for me, but overall Singapore was my favourite esports place I’ve travelled to. This was the first LAN I’ve gone to where I felt like I would want to live in that country for a year or two later in my life.
TI11 event
From what I’ve gathered from reddit, the viewing experience was not the greatest this TI, but I won’t be talking about that since I did not experience it. In my opinion, this TI had the best player treatment of any TI and tournament I’ve been to. The biggest innovation for this was the rotating booths in playoffs, which greatly cut down on how long the days were.I think most tournaments I’ve been to in the past with four bo3s had super long days where you had to play last into first, resulting in not enough time for sleep and prep. This TI I never felt like there was a scheduling disadvantage or a time constraint that led to lack of sleep or rushed preparation. I legitimately didn’t have any player treatment complaints for a full month and I’m a very whiny person. Here are some of the things that I thought made this TI feel smooth on the player side:
TI has always set the standard for player treatment. The food and surrounding location were amazing. No issues with food and beverages the entire month, which is surprisingly rare at events. The hotel was very nice, the practice rooms were great, and the afterparty was super fun, although I got a bit too drunk and didn’t even know there was karaoke :(. Transportation was easy to arrange and readily available with both stadiums close by. Also want to highlight again that the days were relatively short due to the rotating booth technology. There was also instant resolution of issues at the event for us.For example, the practice rooms were too hot on the first day, so we told Valve and boom, AC’s installed that night. We heard a scan and potm ult? Boom there’s a patch to make them quieter the next day. The media shooting was condensed together in the break, which was great for players, and the intros were some of the best ones I’ve seen. The content, although more limited than I would have liked, was mega high quality. There were covid isolation rooms set up for players who got sick and I really appreciate the consideration to have our practice room taken down last so we were able to keep playing before the finals. There’s also the plethora of other industry standards like gear swaps, proper desk chair monitor setups, etc.. There are a few negatives about the event that I want to address though: day 1 of playoffs, remote panel, and the break.
The day one playoffs were pretty bad due to teams being able to hear the casters and game sounds, and we were lucky to avoid playing on that day. To be honest, I’m a bit surprised the audio wasn’t fixed faster with in-ears, sound cancelling headsets, and lowering the volume considering how fast all our other issues were addressed. I think there needed to be a better feedback system established from the players to the admins. I was also surprised to see the public reception to the in game true sights. Maybe it was poor execution, but the concept is super cool and I hope to see it developed more in the future. It’s a hard line to walk, because the most interesting things in comms are also things that the teams don’t want revealed as communication is a big part of dota, but I loved hearing any snippets from other teams. Overall, I felt like the feedback on this was mega weird and negative past the point of being constructive, but maybe it was built up from other things.
The next thing that was talked about a lot was the remote panel situation. I actually don’t think remote panelling is theoretically bad, especially for traditional sports. I think the idea this year was that there were five main languages, and they couldn’t make five equal panels on site without compromising on quality due to space issues and logistics. If cost was an issue they probably wouldn’t have put the panel in Norway. However, there are a few points that make onsite panels superior in Dota compared to normie sports. The biggest one to me is that having players and coaches on analyst panels is super interesting and can add a lot to tournament storylines while also providing very high level analysis. Furthermore, the analysis/fluff panel (compared to draft panel which was done at TI) is where player personalities can come through, channelled by the hosts and panel. I think this gives the audience something to cheer for in the future and builds up the scene while providing unique insight for the viewers. For example, I think that Stormstormer getting to show himself in Arlington improved the tournament and viewing experience. Another point to consider is that I think panel members benefit a lot from talking to casters and players throughout the event, as it elevates the level of analysis and storyline building ability at the event. Also, I think the tournament experience would have been improved by fans being able to meet talent, which opens more content possibilities. Lastly, I really like the idea of TI being a celebration for everyone of the year and having everyone come together.
The last thing I wanted to address was the break in the middle of the tournament. My understanding was that it happened for logistic reasons, but I feel like having a break can be good if done well. I got feedback from friends that some of them were a bit burnt out after watching so much Dota in LCQ and groups, and the break allowed some hype to build. The break also levels the playing field for a team that plays the “wrong” group — there’s often a team at TI that defines the meta of the tournament like CDEC at TI5, and not playing in their group puts teams behind. The break also allowed for a really nice media day that didn’t interfere with practice. However, one problem was that because there were only four teams left in the tournament, the pub and scrim pool was pretty bad, as players and teams don’t play after they lose TI. I would have liked the break to happen with eight teams left in the tournament, which would have also helped keep the hype high. It would also have been nice for more teams to get to play in the big arena with the real TI SEA crowd because it was amazing. And while I liked the break equalising the groups, I thought it was a day or two too long, because it let teams catch up a bit too much, and also made it harder for international fans to attend the event.
Team progression at TI
Overall the tournament was super smooth Dota and mental side for us. Early group stage we weren’t in the best form and drew a lot of series, but I was pleased with the atmosphere and Dota progression. The thing I was most happy about was that even if we lost a game, we were always able to reset and win the next one. I give a lot of credit to Dan the psychologist and the players for this shift in mentality. It felt like the ideas were really flowing during the tournament and it was super easy to talk about anything. Skiter said that he was more stressed double downing in pubs than in the officials–even when we were down 6k vs aster and in the grand finals–and that was a result of our mental preparation for the tournament. However, there were a few non Dota things that weren’t as smooth for us behind the scenes.
During groups one of the players couldn’t sleep and had to go to hospital a couple times to see doctors. Sney got COVID at the end of the playoffs, so honestly the break was clutch for us as he tested negative before the mainstage. He wore a mask as soon as he felt bad, so no one else got it, and while he was the most careful about COVID, he also never had COVID before, so maybe it was easier for him to catch it. There was some mental strain after Sney got covid, since he’s the main pillar of the team as captain, and people were imagining themselves having covid every time any potential symptoms appeared. Sney getting covid also made our prep during the break a lot harder. To be honest, I’m glad the players played so well because our prep going into the upper finals wasn’t the best considering how long we had.
I also want to highlight each player and how much they have grown this season. I think both Sney and Saksa grew into leaders and set the foundation of the team. Whenever someone felt bad, Sney would always be the one to try to bring the team mood up regardless of how he was feeling. If the Dota play or comms were off, Saksa consistently gathered and rallied everyone with a speech. These two really utilised their past experiences to the max and did my job for me :). They are stupid supports though, so on to the important people. Skiter’s Dota improved so much over the last year and he deserves all the credit for it. He was relentless when it came to learning, and constantly thought about ways to better himself and the team. He made me watch every lane with him even when I was feeling lazy, and also focused on and succeeded in becoming a better teammate through how he regulated and expressed his emotions. 33 is the mechanically smartest Dota player I’ve ever worked with. I used to be known for knowing a lot of small things in Dota, but now I get called old and we rely on 33. Sometimes 33 will just say come look at this in my pub or scrim and it’ll be some insane execution of a theorycraft he had. I think what 33 improved the most on this team was becoming a really good teammate on the mental side–he was always helping others finesse Dota mechanics–and believing in his own performance and execution. Tundra nine was already one of the best teammates I’d seen when I joined the team. He was open, self critical, always looking to improve, and actively friends with teammates. I feel like he struggled with self confidence and finding ways to make his vision of Dota work, but he progressed so much this year into the monster player he showed at TI. Overall, this team was by far the hardest working team I’ve been a part of and it’s not even close. I think the team was also the highest mmr team by far in the tournament and it showed.
Player anecdotes
Finally I want to share a small story about each player. Sneyking can’t or won’t pronounce chipped vest. He kept saying chippeded vest, so now this is what our team calls the item. I really appreciate that although he is captain, he never places himself above others. We have a motivational video surrounding Tundra Nine. I think it’s already been shown in places but I hope it makes it into true sight, so i don’t want to spoil it. We watch and listen to the video at least once a day and it’s also quoted as the majority of our npc team comms when we’re chilling. I attribute at least 50% of our TI win to this video and Tundra Nine would be nothing without it. Skiter loves heavy tomato broth from Hai Di Lao a bit too much and can’t do basic maths. No seriously, he told me he wants a “no maths questions in interviews” clause in his next contract. 33 basically only eats Thai food, but has successfully made everyone eat Asian food every day, which I like because Asian food is superior. We went on vacation after TI to Thailand with a group of friends and 33 knew all the food better than the asians. And lastly, after a good day of practice on the way back to the hotel, Saksa asked me to make a speech to the team. I was a bit confused so I said some generic good job guys keep it up, but when I finished he just said NO and made his own speech. It was honestly good stuff to say and I’m glad he did it, but the execution was so funny.
The future
Idk I guess I intend to keep coaching. Maybe I’ll stream a bit but I am incredibly lazy. I’ll make a draft analysis of the finals on Tundra’s youtube. Thanks for reading bye.
Tl;dr: no crimson witness dropped for me + no checks for anal beads = worst TI