The League of Legends betting podcast is brought to you by my Patrons at patreon.com/jalatiLOL. There you can find bonus content like in-depth articles on macro trend analysis and league previews, as well as thoughts on breaking news and the podcast picks before the show is released to platforms. You'll also get to support your creators more directly. patreon.com/jalatiLOL, that's G-E-L-A-T-I-LOL. Good morning everybody, it's currently a little bit after 5am eastern on Friday, July 5th. I hope everyone had a good holiday for those of you that are in the US yesterday. I know the schedule is a little bit weird for this, but again, how would I kind of mess my schedule up a little bit and I had to work? So, we are currently in the middle of game one for RNG and EDG, kind of a close hard fall battle here through the first five or six minutes. Anyway, let's go over EWC. While this is on the other monitor, you get a little live viewing action as I'm doing this here. So, EWC Day 2 firstly, a quick recap from yesterday. I mean, I kind of already touched on it a lot. I covered it in the post for yesterday, but Double Dog Day in EWC. One of those dogs is bigger than the other, but still. Not too crazy given the odds that we're at play, but Day 2 here. Two matches that I think are very... The first one is incredibly interesting to me. The second one is interesting more on price than anything else, but let's get into it here. We have Gen-G minus 500 on the money line, minus 1.5 maps at plus 1.38 or at minus 1.38 plus 1.5 is that minus 17.50 against top esports plus 366 on the money line, plus 1.5 maps at plus 1.14 minus 1.5 at plus 9.82. So, for those of you that didn't listen to yesterday's podcast, I suggest pausing right here, going back and listening to at least the beginning part of that where I discussed the outright position that I took. For those that I want to read along and have a Patreon, I wrote a few paragraphs on a case I made for a team for an outright position. I mean, just full disclosure. Most of you read it or heard me talk about it already. It's top esports. I played top esports outright. I played them plus 440 to reach the final and plus 13.14 to win this tournament outright. My reasoning for that is that the toughest hurdle for them is in their first match, and that I like them more in this first match by a lot than the market does. And I kind of am playing a split stake here via the outright's market, and I'm going to be playing some more here. I'm going to say the position up front and then kind of go through this. I'm working backwards a little bit because I had a lot of thoughts on this, and I'm probably going to be reading a lot of it from the Patreon post, and some of this is going to be stuff that you've heard me say already yesterday. But I think this is a rare opportunity to take a shot at a good team. I would say the best team in the world right now, we don't get very many good opportunities to go against them. For tomorrow, I'm playing top esports plus 1.5 maps at plus 117 for one unit, and top esports on the money line at plus 379 for 0.2 units. I know I've been kind of trying to stop sprinkling the money line here, but I think this is a situation where the edge is I think just a lot bigger. I just think this is a huge edge on price, and I'm going to go into my reasons for that in just a moment here. So, first things first, model projected price for this series was Genji minus 117, and top esports plus 107, so Genji is short favored. That's a drastic, drastic difference than the market price of minus 500. That's massive. So, anytime I have big discrepancies like this, I have to look into it. Is there a reason this team is outperforming or underperforming or whatever, right? It's a little bit different in this situation because we're facing two different regions. They face two different portions of their schedule. Obviously, we're drawing from different data sets here. It's kind of the interesting part of that international play is that there's a heavy, heavy qualitative layer on top of everything. These two teams previously met at MSI. In that last series, it was a best of five series. The price was minus 225 for Genji. We're out to minus 500. For those of you keeping track at home, that's a shift of about 69.2% implied to about 83.3% implied, so that's what, 14.1% delta between the MSI price and this one. Just for the record, this was public, it's in my public P&L. I bet top esports in that spot, a plus 182, and that series went the full five, went the whole distance. Both of these teams are in great form right now. They came home from MSI and just completely dumpster at everybody domestically. They haven't really been tested much at all domestically. They've been dominating. I mentioned yesterday, my main portion of the thesis for this, for my position here, there's the main one. Of all the reasons I'm going to say, the main one is that I just don't think these elite teams. By the elite teams, I'm talking about the five or six best teams on earth. I'm talking about, in no particular order, Genji, Billy Billy, T1, Toppy, Sports, JDG, and if you want to throw a G2 in this mix, I think that's fair. I'm talking about the best teams in the world. The higher up you go, the better you get, there's only so much better at League of Legends that a team can get. When you're at the level that these teams are at, the margins are razor thin, razor thin. The fact of the matter is, I just don't think it's possible. The further up you get, it's like a logarithmic thing. The further up you get, the more difficult it is to get edges on your opponents. The fact of the matter is, I don't think any of these elite teams are this much better than each other to this drastic a degree. They're just not. That's the main thesis here. There's a couple other things. I went through the exercise of this. I took the best team that my models have ever seen. The best statistical performance team since I've started tracking this stuff in 2019. I've been handicapping doing stuff long before that, but since I've been actually hardcore modeling this stuff, it's like 2019. The best team that my models have ever seen. They were like a 2.5 standard deviation team. It was damn one from Summer and Worlds in 2020, second half of the year. Just for the sake of argument, I went and took that team and pitted it up against current Gen-G and current top esports. I couldn't get anywhere remotely close to this price. Couldn't do it. Just on the model data, couldn't get there. Not remotely close. If you want to put a qualitative layer on top of this, you could be like, "Oh, well, you know, maybe the LCK is just way better than the LPL now." Okay, if you want to do that, maybe give them a 25% regional strength bump. Still can't get there on this price. I know where this price came from. The reason this price is the way it is is because Gen-G Zee-Lo is insanely high. They've beaten every other good team in the world. The reload rating is about as high as it could possibly get. The difference is, this isn't chess. You know what I'm saying? This is not chess. No matter how good a team is, this isn't a solved thing where it's a supercomputer beating you. There's a lot of volatility in League of Legends. That's why their rating is as high as it is. The rating is as high as it is because the market is hyperbullish on them because they've dominated all the other good teams they face this entire calendar year. They basically have every accolade you could possibly want. What have they dropped like two series this entire season so far? I get it. But you have to start looking at this like, okay, maybe you do. Maybe you are considering, is maybe Gen-G were in the conversation for the best team ever. Maybe they are. If you think Gen-G are one of the best teams ever, I still can't get to -500. Top e-sports are a good team. In fact, top e-sports are the models current number one team out of the LPL. Again, I already said the model price for this series. The model can't get anywhere remotely close to this. It has these teams pretty damn close to a 50/50. They're dominating their leagues. They went to five games last time out. The price was half what it aired, 14% implied when percentage different from last time and what's ultimately changed here. Like really, what's changed? Okay, like top e-sports came out and lost three games at a row to G2 in the next series following that Gen-G series. Okay, maybe that's a knock on them. Oh, what's the other knock? They haven't beaten Billy Billy yet. Okay, that's fair, whatever. But is that like, are we really talking about going like 14% implied when percentage points difference here? Like, there's no way that's correct. There's no way. A couple other things to mention here. Serious length. Best of threes are more volatile than best of fives. I mentioned this yesterday, but any time you have an instance, any time you have more instances of something, it's more likely to happen closer to expectations. So, say you have a coin flip. The more times you flip that coin, the closer, like, the closer and more accurate it is going to be at getting toward that 50% implied rate. Similarly, in a sporting event, if you have a team, say basketball, for instance, this was the example I used yesterday, but if a team is shooting, you know, 40% from the field or whatever. And, you know, maybe they have a game where they have bad shooting luck and they only shoot 32% from the field. Say they have another bad game. They shoot 33% from the field. Say they have another really good game and they end up shooting 46% from the field. If you eventually play enough games, it's going to land closer to the implied, right? And the reason I bring this up is because, like, if you're dealing with, I mean, let's go with the market implied price here. The market implied price here per map, per map, it's making Gen G more than a 75% chance to win per map in this series. So, yeah, sure. If you play a 10-game series or a 15-game series, yeah, let's say we think the market's correct. If you think that's in the ballpark, sure. Yeah, the further along we go, the more likely it is that it's going to be hitting closer to that 75%, like, you know, on average in the aggregate, right? In a best of three, it's a lot less likely, or it's a lot more likely that you get an upset in a best of three than you do in a best of five. We've seen this bear out. There is plenty of historical data to support this, like, in League of Legends specifically, because it's not just a clean coin flip, or it's not just a clean percentage multiplication situation because you have to factor inside choice, you have to factor in certain teams, do well on certain sides, you have to factor in all these different patch ideas, but we have enough data going back enough times now to know that, especially in best of fives, favorites do much better in best of fives and they do in best of threes. Just, that's, that's, we have enough data to know that. Now, another angle here. And, you know, maybe we saw this come into play today a little bit. Travel and situational vaulted. I'm going to refer to this a couple times in this podcast, but situational volatility. And what I mean by that is, you know, this is an event where teams had to travel quite a distance. Saudi Arabia is not really close to anybody in this tournament. The Europeans had the easiest travel, I suppose, but a lot of these teams played games this past weekend on, like, Saturday and Sunday and then flew out and, you know, they have a couple days to prep and that's it. Some teams, some people, some humans forget sporting events. Some humans just don't acclimate to new environments well. Some, you know, maybe they had bad travel. Maybe they had a bad week of practice. I don't know how much practice these teams have been able to get in at this tournament because if you look at the games yesterday that happened yesterday on day one here. Doesn't look like anybody's really practiced all that much. Everybody kind of looks really sloppy and just it was just a complete mess. And, you know, when that's the case, like, anything can happen, right? I mean, we saw a fanatic get absolutely dumped trucked by liquid. I mean, that second game ended up close, but that shouldn't have been liquid had like a 3K gold lead to start that game and just bungled it. Again, sloppy. Liquid should have, liquid probably should have steamrolled both those games. They won 2.0 anyway, but they should have absolutely trounced fanatic yesterday. I don't think anyone saw that coming. I certainly did, and I got wrecked by it, but you just don't know how travel is going to affect certain teams. We see every year, every international tournament, there's always some team that just underperforms, and I'm not even just including travel on this. I'm talking about like practice environment. Some teams don't acclimate well to that. Some teams don't acclimate well to literal habitat, like the temperature or the food or whatever. Other teams, maybe they just don't sleep well. But I'm talking about like the patch too. Like some teams just don't adapt to a patch. You see that in regular, you know, regular season domestic League of Legends too. Some teams just sometimes you just have a bad read on a patch or you have a bad draft or something like that, right? Now, the reason I bring this up is because any time you're embracing volatility, that reduces the margin of error for the favorites, especially when there's a hefty, hefty price tag on it. So, you know, when you have volatility, you want to kind of like compress everything more toward parity unless a team is showing you time and time again that they're good at adapting to this kind of adversity. I think this tournament specifically is one of the weirder situations that we've seen ever. Again, I mentioned yesterday, this goes back like 15 years ago or 12 years ago when we were having the third party tournament still like just in the middle of seasons and stuff like that. And this was bizarre. This is a super short. It's not a short notice. They knew about it, but it's just super disruptive. Like they just had to dip out of their seasons and travel, you know, some teams as much as 12 hours to get here to play like one, two, maybe three series if they're a finalist, right? And they're best of threes. Like literally in this tournament, anything can happen. Like nothing is going to surprise me in this tournament unless like liquid win it. Like then I'll be a little surprised, but or fly quest winning. It would be the real surprise here. But like you really can't, I can't discount enough, like just how weird it is to just be like, uproot yourself, plop yourself down, play with best of three, a single best of three, you could send you home. It's just a weird situation, right? There's not familiar surroundings. There's not familiar staff working these events. Like this isn't comfortable for these players other than they're playing League of Legends with their teammates. That's the only thing that's comfortable. That's the entire thing, right? So keep in mind like all those off the Rift factors. I already mentioned like what I think is, you know, I don't think anything's really changed between these two teams. So like the reason I bring all of this stuff up and I kind of mentioned it on all this stuff yesterday is because like I think quite simply this handicap comes down to how often are you going to get one of the best teams in the world at plus 366 in a match in a best of three. It's not going to happen very often. I'm just going to tell you like there's there's not really much of a precedent for this. I was trying to come up with some stuff, but like think about it this way, where would you rank top, like top esports globally right now? Like current form right here at this point in time, I think there's a case to be made that they're number two. I think there's a case to be made that they're number two. They're the best LPL team currently, like in current form. I know Billy Billy had a tougher group. I know Billy Billy have looked a little shaky and I know the top haven't beaten them yet, but they've only really had one shot to do that or two shots to do that. I think it was right. I forget. So, but like right now, right here, right now, all we can do is look at what's in front of us currently what we've been seeing. And maybe you have some kind of like strategic X's and O's reason why top esports might struggle here. I think that's totally reasonable if you have it. But you're getting like at worst, at worst, I think you say top esports are probably like your world number five. You could maybe say six, I guess, if you think G2 and JDG and all and the two Korean teams are better than them. Maybe? I personally think right now, going to my head, I actually think top esports are probably your world number two or three. Like actually, like they're just, they're just stopping everybody. They look really, really good. They had a, they didn't even have a real bad showing at MSI. They got three O'd by G2. That was kind of rough like the result of it, but two of those were close. They went to five games against Genji the last time they faced off. They were half the price or half the risk return, you know, half the return ratio on the price in that match. Literally, they were plus 182 in that match. We're getting plus 366 here. I don't know. I know that's not a literal translation of the implied odds, but like still. Unless you think Genji are bar none without a shadow of doubt, the best team in the history of League of Legends or you think top esports are pure for odds and total dog shit and way worse than I think they are or my models think they are or the world thinks they are. You need to kind of think both are the case to get to this kind of price. And that's kind of the point I'm making here is this isn't just, oh, I think, I think Genji are that good. I think Genji might be one of the best teams we've ever seen. Okay, that's fine. They still shouldn't be this big of a favorite. You have to think Genji are one of the best teams to ever play this game and that top esports are drastically overrated in order to arrive at this kind of price for this series. And I don't know how you do that. I can't reconcile that. So I know I just went on a whole spiel yesterday about how I've made kind of a bad habit of going against elite teams too often and it's cost me a lot of money this season. And I know that I've kind of, I'm trying to get away from like double staking is all my strong opinions have just been wrong, but I cannot for the life of me reconcile this price. I can't do it. I can't figure it out. As some of you know, I already played top esports to reach the finals at +440 kind of as a pseudo way of saying they're going to win this series. And I also played them plus 13 14 to win the event for a quarter unit as well. So I have 1.25 units stake to their kind of as a proxy for this. I'm going to play some more top esports here. I'm okay double staking this because I really do think this price is just way way too disrespectful to a team that is one of the most I think they're one of the best teams in the world. When's the last time we had like a world, top esports could win the world championship. Like that's not an outlet. That's not outlandish. That's probably that's reasonably likely. You know, like we're not like this is like I'm not betting. This isn't like I'm betting KT Rolster against Gen G. Okay, like you want to play relative price game and do that a little bit in the next series too, but let's play the relative price game. So this summer, we've seen KT Rol or we've seen Gen G play six of their LCK opponent teams. They were minus 2300 against Ferex. They were minus 195 against T1. They were minus 891 against KT Rolster, minus 6000 against Breon. Minus 513 against Hamaw Life esports. That's the closest comparison. I think we have here. If you want to go back to spring, they were minus 689 against D+ Kia in Week 8. They were, let's see, they were minus 350 against KT Rolster in Week 6. They were minus 319 against Hamaw Life esports in Week 7. They were, let's see, do we have it? They were minus 652 to KT Rolster in Week 4. Now, I think KT was a different beast in spring. Maybe not the best comp, but I think reasonably speaking, the market is essentially comparing top esports to Hamaw Life esports. And I think where you fall on that spectrum of what you think about those teams is a good... I think that's a reasonable measuring stick. Maybe not for literal exes and o's and how the teams play. I think Hamaw Life play a completely different game than top esports do. I think just looking at how these teams win games, part of why I like top esports, just like from a strategic perspective, is the top esports are an explosive early game team. They won the best early games in the world over the duration, the aggregate of 2024. So far in summer, and again, I'm using, for the tail of the tape, stuff you're seeing on the Patreon, for Patreon subscribers here, I'm using a blend of the spring playoffs and some of summer, and then I went back to include some MSI matches in this as well to kind of get a good blend of how these teams are performing as the elite teams. Top esports with that sample set. They have a lead at 20 minutes and more than 70% of their games. They have a 94.7% closing rate, and they have a significant lead at 20 minutes and 55.6% of their games. 55.6% of their games with a significant lead at 20 minutes and they win 94.7% of their games with a lead at 20 minutes. That's against good teams mostly. Top or no joke, top is an elite team. This isn't just a team that's like beating up on a bad LPL or anything like that. I do think the elite three teams are just way better than everybody else in the LPL. I get it. I get it. Let's knock them down a peg because the league is weak this year. Okay, that's fine. I still can't get to this price. There's not a chance. I can't do it. All of that said, I know I've ranted. I've gone off for like 20 minutes about this match already, but I'm taking a big position here. I know I've been running really, really poorly, but this price is just wrong. It's just wrong. There's no way. There is no way the top esports should be this big of an underdog to anybody. Top esports shouldn't be this big of an underdog to the best team of all time. I actually did that. I went and put it into the model. I put old damn 120/20 in against top esports and it wasn't even close to this price. And that was the best team ever by a mile from a performance data perspective, from the model perspective. No way. This is dumb. This is a dumb price. And you know what? If Genji come out tomorrow, or not even tomorrow, in like five hours or whatever, and they lay a beat down on top esports, I can totally live with it. I can totally live with it at this time because there's just no universe where this price is right. So, yeah, I'm breaking some rules here, but I played the Outrights and I'm also playing top esports plus one to headmaster plus one seventeen and top esports money line plus three seventy nine for point two. And you know what? I'm okay with it. I'm okay taking it on the risk in this case. I'm not going to bitch and moan if I lose. You hear it there. You heard it here first. Anyway, twenty minutes later, we are to G2 esports minus six fifty on the money line minus one half minus one fifty six against fly quest plus four fifty six on the money line plus one half is that plus one twenty eight minus one half is that plus one thousand fifty eight. Model made this G two minutes to a seven fly quest plus one eighty eight. Again, that is not waiting for regional strength. It is just looking at the raw data. The most glaring thing here is that fly quest only have a lead at twenty minutes and forty eight percent of their games. So less than half their games. They have a lead at twenty minutes against good teams here. Well, it's a blended table. It's not just against good teams, but their agnostic economy relative to this event is a dumpster fire at sixteen twenty one agnostic differentials. Fine. It's above zero, but it's zero more or less. So not exactly flattering data for fly quest, but G2 haven't been as pristine this summer and it's waiting that performance pretty heavily in this as well. So that's why G2 are only minus two or seven of the model. Look, G2 are a bigger favorite than that. There's no question there. I'm not doubting that. But I think there's a couple things to keep in mind here. We're going to play the relative price game in just a second, but let's pause it for a second here that North America just has Europe's number this year. Maybe Europe is just a week or league. I don't think this necessarily. I think it's going through a transition phase, but still like in the aggregate is a way better league. Like their medium teams are often, you know, data wise, just better than ours. So I think in this kind of thing, we saw, I mean, we saw fanatic get utterly on like pants to this morning. I don't think, you know, maybe, maybe there's some specific niche thing with specifically fanatic that they are poor international performers or that liquid. Just for some reason, liquid just has their number. I don't know why, but they just do keep that in mind. But maybe. Maybe it's just an N A versus EU thing. Maybe NA's got better prep this year. I don't know. Anyway, I think right now you have to treat G2 as like better than fanatic, even though domestically fanatic have been the better team this summer so far. G2 have kind of been coasting a little bit. They haven't looked really that dialed in. I hate to use that kind of shit, but it does kind of seem that way. There's three main questions you have to ask yourself here for like the qualitative layer of this handicap. First, how much worse is flyquest and liquid slash how much better is G2 than fanatic, just like in your like mental model here, like forget the numbers just like make a percentage, you know, mental model it. The second, are you embracing the volatility of this situation that I talked about in the previous match with like the travel spot and the getting acclimated and the weird patch and the weird surroundings and the weird situation. If you're doing that, you have to decide whether you're fully embracing that or not. And then three, I think it's pretty obvious that G2 are a much better team, but at what point is the price starting to get interesting to you as a handicapper. That's ultimately what we're talking about here. So let's play the relative price game again with this one. Just looking at individual matte price for this series and let's try to look at what we've seen in Europe this summer. I'm not going to read off every single one of these matches, but Patreon subscribers, I pulled the odds for every single one of the games that G2 have played so far this summer just to give you a visual comparison. So maybe the most like competent or not competent, like the closest comparison to the price in this is. All right, so first of all, I'm rambling here. The individual money map money line price here in this series is G2 minus 366 per map, which is implying roughly like 80%. I believe what's 366 I think 366 like 80 80 something 78 and a half. I'm playing a 78 and a half percent win rate per map for G2 almost 80%. What's around the 48% for the sake of per like just shortness, brevity, brevity, not how I speak. Anyway, the closest comp we have to that was week one day three of summer G2 or minus 345 against BDS. I'll throw a couple other ones out. I'm not going to read all these. They were week three day one. They were minus 200 to fanatic week four day one. They were minus 500 to vitality. So that's 366 implied map or not imply like literal map price here. Do you think fly quest are better than week one BDS? Do you think they're better than fanatic? Do you think they are like, again, you think this will think what you want of this, right? Like, I'm not, I'm not here to speak my opinion on exactly, you know, where I think fly quest lie in the LAC. But I think going through an exercise like this is good to kind of like give you perspective on like how far we've come on a price, right? Like, if you like, this is basically saying that fly quest are about the same as BDS. If you don't agree with that. Week one summer BDS, by the way, not the BDS that we have now seen trounced most of the LAC is week one BDS. Do you think fly quest is better than week one BDS from summer? If you do, then this is probably a place to embrace the volatility of the situation and bed fly quest. I don't think it really matters like specifically where I think they fall. Like, I don't think it's as binary as do you think they're better than BDS. No, I don't think it's that clean. Actually, their statistical profile compares most favorably to vitality and vitality or minus 500 dogs in that match. Actually, bed vitality in that spot. But anyway. The point here is like, this is a prohibitive price for G2. I don't think it's, I don't think you can really make a case that this is a warranted price. No matter how much they've stomped on NA over the years, no matter how good you think G2 are, I think G2 are the best Western team with a decent bit of margin. But this price is so prohibitive given the volatility of the situation that we're in here. Like, the short travel spot, the weird surroundings, the new settings, the new, you know, host. Like, it's not the same staff, not the same referees, like all the travel, all the situational spot, like stuff that I've discussed. Then you have this insane price. I think this is fly quest or pass. Now, I don't have the stones to take fly quest here personally. Both the underdogs one this morning. I'm already taking another shot tomorrow against top e-sports or against Gen G or I'm taking a shot against Gen G here. I like that one actually better than this one. Oh, that's another thing. You want to compare prices. I want to compare prices. All right, it's 4.56 against 3.66. Let's do this quick with 3.66, 4.56. All right. There is a 3.5% implied win rate delta between those two. Like, do you think it's roughly similar ballpark that top beats Gen G as it is that fly quest beats G2? That's another way to look at this. Give yourself some, you know, like guide posts to go by in these kind of things, right? Anyway, this is this is fly quest or pass at this price. The G2 is prohibitively priced. I absolutely with all the volatility and all the weird situations that are this tournament, especially because G2's form hasn't been particularly great recently. They should be heavy favorites, but I think this is just a little bit too far, but I personally don't have the stomach to back another dog on this slate. I'm going to be focused on top e-sports and I really do think like the G2 price is absolute poison. It's too expensive. Don't play G2. It's just a matter of if you have the stomach for fly quest or not. No action for me, fly quest or pass. That's going to be it for me. I know I was super long winded on this one, but this top e-sports position is actually going to end up being my biggest position of the year. I think in any given game, I have to double check that, but I'm pretty sure this is the biggest position I'm taking this year if you include the futures in that. And that future is basically banking on, you know, the result of the, it's, the futures price is basically like the second portion of the double stake for this. And I know I've been trying to get away from that, but I just think it's too good an opportunity to pass up. So I know super long winded, forgive me for that. And I'm sorry for getting this out late. This starts up in about five hours from when I'm recording this, but hopefully you enjoy it. And hopefully we get the dub. I will see you then.
