The League of Legends betting podcast is brought to you by my Patrons at patreon.com/jilladellol. 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/jilladell. That's G-E-L-A-T-I-L-O-L. Good evening everyone, it's currently about 6.15 Eastern on Wednesday, July 3rd, the eve of 4th of July. Happy 4th to those that are celebrating in the US. You know, it's a little early, but you know, happy, happy 4th regardless. I don't know about you guys, but like, you know, the most American thing that I can think of to do is to watch some video games tournament this evening in Saudi Arabia and then likely working tomorrow night, which is what I'll be doing. So, yeah, maybe a bit of a bizarre holiday in the middle of the week here, but a holiday and nonetheless. So, this is going to be a post about the esports world cup. I know people have some thoughts and opinions on this, I'm not going to go into all of that. I wrote a little bit more about it on the patreon, but regardless of your moral takes on the event, this is kind of a throwback to old school League of Legends. Like when the game was started getting off the ground, there was a lot of third party tournaments, like third party international tournaments for big prize pools. And this is a huge prize pool for relatives of League of Legends. This is, first place in this event is just short of the same as winning the world championship. Obviously doesn't come with the same amount of allure and reputation and all that, but money is money and, yeah, it's just, you know, people have been talking about all the sports-washing stuff and the Saudi blood money and all this shit, but like, to me, this event kind of just harkens back to those old school third party tournaments, which by the way, we're also run by some super sketchy individuals, but that's a different discussion. They were the huge part of the landscape. I mean, this was like before you had the domestic leagues and the LCS and stuff like that, you had three or four or five of these big tournaments a year. That's kind of how, I mean, Dota ran things that way until they had their domestic leagues start up a little while ago, but there was a long period of time where like, for those that are, for those that are like new to esports, relatively speaking, this is the way it used to be. Like we didn't have like leagues, like I'm going, I'm going back like beyond like more than 15 years ago. We didn't have leagues for a long time. Like we just had the game and you would play and there would be like these big tournaments that happened online or in person somewhere, and everyone would fly out to these tournaments a couple times a year and they'd be big prizes and then you won the tournament. And then you just wouldn't get anything for a little while until the next big tournament. So we're kind of spoiled now with the league model, the domestic league model that a lot of games have shifted to, where you just have stuff going on all the time, but it didn't used to be that way. It used to be, you know, you would just have a couple big events a year and that was what you would focus all your time on. It was like March Madness whenever those things were on where you just have like, you know, 60 games in, you know, five days or something across, you know, across a couple different screens and all. It was really, it was just a wild different time. It's a lot more like March Madness was that like March Madness is back then than it is like for league now. You just have like, oh, here's 20 teams and they're going to go play in this event and maybe we'll broadcast some of the games. And that was it. And everything was invite only or you had to qualify by winning something else. So kind of a throwback to that. I'm not going to go into all the other stuff. You know, my opinion on this is, you know, think what you want of it. If you don't want to support it, then don't support it. It's no, you know, I'm not going to hold anything against anybody for that. But for me, I am a total junkie for like high quality League of Legends, high quality play. And the fact of the matter is this is a world championship caliber prize pool with eight of the best teams in the world at this event. And we don't get to see that very often. We don't see international stuff very often. And we're getting another one this year. So I'm going to be watching it and partaking in it and betting on it. So I'll be back. So LPL is actually starting the next stage of their summer season on Friday. I will be, I will have a post for that tomorrow as well as a podcast. But let's get right into my thoughts on the sports World Cup here for the first slate. I guess before we get on to that, I am going to, I am going to have an outright position here for this event. And it's kind of a, it's not really a controversial one, but I'm going to be taking top e sports to reach the final at plus 440 for one unit. I think I got that at BAS or Nitro. I forget, but I'm pretty sure that's where it was. And then I'm going to play top e sports to win the entire event at plus 1314 for a quarter unit. That was that pinnacle. So I have a couple of reasons for this. Obviously, top e sports, their first, there's a whole bunch of reasons. I went to a lot more detail and laid out some, you know, very basic cursory math on this, but in the Patreon post. But the short version of this is one, this is a very short tournament. There's going to be seven matches total, just seven matches. It's a predetermined bracket. And anytime you ever predetermined bracket, like in a sport like tennis or, you know, playoffs and major sports where it can't really change much based on seating. It's just the winner of this plays the winner of that. And that's that. We only have eight teams here. It's only going to be seven matches. Everything's laid out already. And that's that. So if you have, if you think there is a mispricing in the market, like I do, then sometimes the best way to play that is through an outright price. And in this case, I think there is a severe mispricing in the first matchup between top and gen G, top and gen G, which happens on Friday. I'll be going into more detail on that in tomorrow's post specifically for that match. But the long story short is I think the price is just wrong. And I'm going to be backing top in that spot. I'll probably be double dipping. I'll probably be betting top in that match as well as this. But I wanted to lay an outright position out before the tournament started here. Basically, because top piece was played gen G and gen G of the tournament favorite, that's the biggest hurdle for them is right away. Maybe you could argue the bigger hurdle would be Billy Billy because they haven't beaten Billy Billy yet this season. But the biggest hurdle for them is is right at the beginning, right? If I think that price is wrong and I think they're at worst a coin flip, probably going to be moderate favorites against G2, who I assume is going to be fly quest, then they're going to be in the finals if they beat gen G, right? I mean, it's not 100% obviously, but if you make their match against gen G like a 55-45 and then I'm just going to do math on the air, they say never to do this. If you make them, see, I personally think top B sports are like 45% to be gen G. Even if you're pessimistic about that, right? Let's say you think it's a 60-40 for gen G. You do 40% times, let's say they're going to be 50-50 against G2. I think that's reasonable, right? That's 20%, 20% would be plus 400, you're getting plus 440. I think that's just value as it is and I'd almost rather play that. Split-stake that and the outright on this. If they just win those two matches, that's the finals. The other thing at work here is that the first match is a best of three, not a best of five. In a best of three, the best team has a lower chance of winning than they would in a best of five. The reason being if you have more instances of that percentage. Say you make a team 60-40 in a best of five. If they have more instances and more of that extra margin of error to make their 60% win probability, then they're more likely to win the longer the series goes. That goes for any sport, anything. You see it in shooting percentages and basketball and stuff. If you give more instances of a higher percentage win rate thing to happen, it will happen closer to its expected percentage. In this case, in a best of three, you're more likely to see an upset because it's just fewer instances of that happening. I think I'm going to be playing top against Genji spoiler for tomorrow's show. Because of that, I wanted to play some of that stake on an outright position in top of esports for the entire event. The main thesis here is mostly that I think all these top five-ish teams, six if you want to include JDJ who are not at this event, are a lot closer rated than I think the market is implying. The market tends to use Elo ratings. There are a lot of the modelers out there using Elo ratings as well, which is fine for most things. But for something like this where you have all of these teams, they're all so good. You look at their underlying performance metrics, they're all incredibly good. Even if you apply a manual adjustment for regional strength, it's not going to be that much different between the LCK and the LPL. I personally lean slightly to the LCK, but even with that taken into consideration, I just can't get, right now, you can get more than plus 300 on top esports right now at a couple spots. That's insane to me. I know they haven't beaten Billy Billy. I know that Genji won MSI and have just been shit stomping everything all over the place all year long. I know Genji are the best team in the world, but there's no way they are 80% to win a best of three against another elite team across the globe. There's just not. I would bet plus 310 on T1, and T1 have looked pretty bad, hopefully, more on that in a bit, but it's just a dumb price. I'm going to be playing, I played a little bit outright on top esports, and then I'm probably going to be playing them in that match tomorrow, but I wanted to get an outright out before this post. All right, first match of the esports world cup, quarterfinals, right to quarterfinals again. Billy Billy gaming, minus 175 on the Moneyline, minus 1/2 maps at plus 188. The plus 1/2 is at minus 556 against T1 plus 143, plus 1 1/2 maps at minus 234, the minus 1/2 is at plus 401. Any model that I referenced in this is using spring playoffs, current summer, as well as MSI data sets. The idea being to cut out some of the noise of the layout match up some spring, look at only how they played against good teams domestically and internationally, but also include a look like the summer current to look at current form. There's no manual adjustment for regional strength in any of these numbers. I'll talk about that as a qualitative layer on top of things. This is just the raw numbers. Model made Billy Billy minus 196 in this contest, showing value on them is a small value on them is a favorite here. It's weird, these two have both looked like a little bit shaky so far this summer relative to what we expect from them. More so for T1 than Billy Billy. I think Billy Billy had been fine. They are just in kind of a tough group in their group draw for domestic play. It hasn't exactly been the best form from either. They've dropped some games to suspect opponents. T1 have looked just a little. They haven't looked very sharp. They just look a little out of form, I guess is the way to put it. Not bad, but they just look off a little bit. Could just be the fatigue of the schedule. I mean, you got to remember these two teams had deep runs at the World Championship. Really, if you want to go back, these two teams have basically been in playoffs, have made deep playoff runs, and deep international runs at every event that they've been to the last couple of years. Especially over the last year and a half, they came back from MSI, had to go right back into their domestic leagues. Billy Billy had to go right back into a domestic league that jostled things up with fearless draft too. It's no surprise that maybe the fatigue of the schedule is potentially getting to these teams a little bit. Usually, the reason the MSI hangover is a thing is because a lot of times these teams, this is the only downtime they're really going to get before the World Championships and before their domestic playoffs. If you were going to see these teams fade a little bit or show poor form for a little bit, it's either going to be at the beginning of summer or the end of summer once they've clinched playoffs. A lot of the teams tend to struggle early in summer, so it's really no surprise that they've kind of co-set a little bit here. It's not like either of them have looked bad. They've both looked like any league team still. They're both maintaining just incredible underlying numbers, but I'm talking just relative to the expectation that we've developed for them. They've looked a little off recently. At MSI, I ended up betting a lot of the underdogs at MSI because, like I said earlier, I basically think all of these elite teams are not that much different from one another, even though the results haven't bared that out. T1 haven't been able to get over the hurdle with Gen-G, top e-sports haven't been able to get over the hurdle at Billabilly Gaming. Just because that's been the case, the two favorites in those instances have kind of inflated metrics because they've gotten the result every time, which is going to, you know, any kind of elo-based model that's going to improve the rating for those teams. Performance-wise, these two are not, like, these teams are all not that far apart, and they're all at such an elite level that, like, the margins we're talking about are not very big at all. So, I do think Billabilly should be favored here. I do think their T1's form is a question at this point right now, but at the same time, T1 have a bit of a clutch team to them. They always tend to show up at international competitions. This is a team that, you know, fakers seeing everything, but a lot of the other players on this team haven't really, like, as young as they are, they've been through a lot already. They've had some deep international tournament runs. They've dealt with a lot of adversity. They're dealing with the whole DDoS thing domestically, all this stuff. Like, this is a battle-hardened team, despite the fact that four of them are extremely young still. So, it would not surprise me at all to see T1 show up and have, like, you know, clutch it out here. This is a team that's got a clutch team after all, but it would not surprise me to see them, like, you know, show up big at this tournament and be like, "Oh, holy shit, they were just sandbagging domestically." But it also wouldn't surprise me to see if this current run-of-form is kind of legitimate, and maybe they're just kind of, like, not peeking at the right time. That's going to be an interesting dynamic to observe of this whole tournament. It's like, "Were some of these teams just sandbagging domestically because this is a huge prize pool?" And, like, there's a really good chance all these teams are kind of looking ahead to this tournament, and it's going to be interesting to see that, especially with this next one. So, for this match, I didn't play anything. No action for me. Heavy, heavy lean to T1, just because of that whole, like, elite team's coin flip angle. Billy Billy should be favored, but you could make a case that this is a bit heavy-handed. No action for me. Heavy, lean to T1. The current form concerns me enough that I don't want to get involved, but heavy, heavy, lean to T1. Second match is Team Liquid +108 on the Moneyline +1 on the head maps at -279. -1/2 is at +293 against Fnatic. -131 on the Moneyline. -1/2 is at +221. +1/2 is at -384. Model-made Team Liquid, a short favorite in this contest, meaning that it thinks the market is the wrong favorite. Again, this is not including regional strength. It is just the raw numbers. This is a real - I think I called it an onion match in my Patreon post. This is a real onion of a match. Super, lot of layers to it. Lot going on here. First of all, let's rewind here. Let's go back to MSI. Liquid vastly, vastly overperformed at MSI. They were legitimately good in that tournament. They didn't end up doing anything really, but they got a game off T1. They played really, really well against Fnatic in that matchup. More on that in a bit. I had low expectations. Maybe I was wrong about that, but they were even expectations aside. They were objectively very good at that event. In fact, I think they probably should have been up in the series against T1 before that weird throw happened. But Fnatic were the opposite end of the spectrum. They were arguably the biggest disappointment relative's expectation at that event. Expectations weren't particularly high for them at that event. They legitimately just played very, very poorly at that event outside of humanoid. That's something to factor. Another thing. Liquid have looked completely dominant domestically. It's the LCS, so grain of salt. But Fnatic also looked dominant domestically. They started off 6-0 this summer. They were utterly stomping everybody, almost every match. They dropped a close contest to G2 last week, or the week before last, and then went 0-2 this week against Heretics and BDS to end up losing some of their playoff seating. They looked terrible this week. Now, was this because they were looking ahead of this event? They didn't do a lot of prep for that, because they had already clinched playoffs the week before. Certainly possible. It was only two games. It didn't make a lot of sense for them to really go crazy prepping for that when they had already clinched playoffs for debate, right? But you have to sincerely consider that they were mailing it in this past week, having already clinched playoffs. I think a lot of this handicap is how much weight you put on that. Another angle. More layers here. Layers keep peeling. Relative regional strength. LEC, clearly a better league, has been a better league basically forever, and I think the teams at the top are theoretically more battle tests than the LCS teams. But I think you could make a case, given that the bottom half of the LEC had a really, really down year that maybe that isn't the case. Maybe the LEC isn't quite significantly better than the LCS this year specifically. I think the LEC is in a weird transitional period, where there's a lot of veterans that are kind of washed and on their way out, and a lot of teams that made drastic, drastic changes and overhauls this season. And then generally the teams that were super hyped up like Carmine Corp have just not really delivered. So I think there's legitimately like five good teams in the LEC right now, and then there's a few that are just very, very, maybe not any true dumpster fire to your teams, but pretty close. For a while, part of what's made the LEC so interesting over the years is that the overall parody of the league, like everyone's pretty good. But you had some really, really drastic drop-offs from teams like Mad Lions, Carmine Corp disappointing, Rogue just fell off a cliff. Like there's no longer, so far there hasn't been like that depth of quality. I think it goes deeper than the LCS does. I think half the league is competitive. I think the LCS, it's like two and a half teams, three teams. So I don't know, you can make a case that maybe the LCS isn't that much worse than the LEC right now currently, but that's a debate. I think that weighs in. I still think the top of the LEC is just better. If you just look at like the performance metrics for them, like the top LEC teams just have like, they all have significantly better agnostic economy than the top LCS teams do. They have better, especially when you take out the softball games against the bad teams. They just have better, like right now, like if you look at the model, the model likes liquid slightly in this contest because they have a positive agnostic called differential permit, whereas Fnatic are basically at zero. That's again using data set for this event. It's going to be a little bit wonky and warped, but you have to consider that like Fnatic domestically are going to be more challenged. I have more of their playoff sample size in here. I also have their poor performance at MSI included in this sample. So, like even with all that considered, they're differentials and is big, but their agnostic economy, like raw agnostic goal per minute is better and that's kind of like the most telling thing to me. I still have questions about liquid's champion pool issues. I know APA has been good so far this summer, but like nobody in the LCS has even remotely tried to test liquid. You can say, "Oh, well, if the champion pulls an issue, why didn't anyone at MSI do it?" Well, the patch at MSI was not really conducive to attacking a certain player's pool. I think this one you can maybe go after it a little bit more, but we'll see. That's not a thing until we see it for real on the field. Model made the liquid the favorites here. I'm going against my model. Before MSI, if you gave me this price on Fnatic, I would have laughed you out of the room straight up. In fact, if you go back and look at the actual odds for that series, I don't know if you guys remember, but I double-staked Fnatic to sweep that series. I played two units on -1.47 for Fnatic at -1. It was two units on Fnatic -1 head maps at -1.47 back at MSI. It was like my biggest single loss at that tournament. Fnatic, just with a colossal underperformance on the day. Two of the three games in that series had really - I didn't like the draft for them at all. They just generally played very poorly at that event outside of humanoid. It was a very bizarre no-show from them. I'll admit, Liquid have kind of proved me wrong time and time again this season. They've taken a lot of money from me doubting them. But the price at that event, Fnatic were -4.13 favorites in that contest. I double-staked Fnatic -1 head maps at -1.47 in that series. You can get a cheaper price on the money line right now in this series. I'm not going to go completely ham on this because I think it's reasonable that I consider this my way of showing some respect to Liquid. That I'm not like triple or quad-staking this. But Fnatic should be favored. They should be much, much bigger favorites in this contest. I'm going against my model. This is mostly just that I think the top of the LEC is a lot better than the top of the LCS currently. That might change by the end of the summer, I don't know. But I think this price is cooking in and putting way too much weight on the last time these two played. I think that was a 5th percentile game from Fnatic and a 95th percentile series from Liquid in that specific event and at that specific match moment in time. Domestically, neither of these teams have really done anything to move the needle or disprove you. Maybe you could be super concerned about the most recent week of Fnatic, but you could also say they were probably looking forward to this and that they had already clinched playoffs and it didn't matter to them. There's a lot more incentive for them to care about this tournament with all the prize pool than their domestic tournament where the prize pool is very small. To me, I would have left you out of the room if you showed me this and I don't think anything has really fundamentally changed besides the specific result we got last time and it was a one-time occurrence. So, give me Fnatic here. I'm going to split, stake this, a split double stake basically. I'm going to play Fnatic Moneyline - 131 for 1.31 units and I'm going to play Fnatic - 1.5 maps and +221 for 0.69 units. That's a net of two units staked here, just splitting it over the Moneyline and the 1.5 maps. I mean, really, you could just go heavy and just play Moneyline if you think there's going to be a little bit of nerves or weirdness or shakiness. The travel can always be a weird thing, but I think you can make a case for that, but there's no way in hell that Fnatic - I will pay to see Fnatic perform that badly again. And I think this price is egregious and there's always volatility when you have travel and short notice and all this stuff, so I wouldn't really be surprised about anything, but I'll pay to see liquid upset me again. So, that's where I play. I thought about triple staking this and I might end up coming back and adding more Fnatic because the more I'm looking at this, the more I'm thinking about, the more I'm talking myself through it, this is a dumb price. Like, we went from an 80% implied win rate to a 56% because they lost once. Like, really? That's dumb to me. And even if you think 80% was wrong and stupid before and it was like 65, 35 or something, going from 65 to 56, is that accurate either? I don't think so. So, nothing's really fundamentally changed. I don't think with these two to make me think this other than, you know, maybe you give a bump to Team Liquid, and even if you give a bump to them, this price is silly. So, that's it for me. I'll be back tomorrow with LPL for Friday as well as the Sports World Cup Day 2. Best of luck and I'll see you then.
