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 also get to support your creators more directly. patreon.com/jilladell that's G-E-L-A-T-I-L-O-L. Good evening everybody. It's currently at about 3.45 a.m. Eastern, we are currently in the draft for Game 3 between DRX and Nong Shim sweating this DRX Moneyline position. I'm going to quickly get the LEC and LCS podcasts here jambed in between these games so I can go ahead and watch this match in the LCK. So a couple things before we get started here. First of all, I have no recap for this. I haven't seen the other games so this is going to be a shorter show. Second of all, just another friendly reminder that I'm probably going to be doing it in this format moving forward because I frequently, Friday nights like really my only free night of the week and you know as people know, I work nights so I kind of have this weird compulsion to actually get out and do stuff and be social and see other humans for a change on Friday nights so I try to make it a point to go out and do that so I don't sit in all Friday nights. I try to take advantage, you usually go out and then I'll come back and since I'm going to be awake anyway, I'll finish up the LEC and LCS in the wee hours of the morning on Saturday and record the show. That's likely going to be how I'm doing it unless I have something like traveling or something to do on weekends, but so just a little housekeeping there. All right, LEC Summer week three, day one. There are any model projections that you see on the patreon now and that you hear me refer to here are now using spring priors plus the current summer split five games, winter is now removed and pretty shortly I'll be removing most of the summer split as well. And as always, the model automatically puts more weight on the more recent performances. Not like it's not like a tapered off. It's more it looks at less for a less day, less 12 kind of thing. So the thing here, a couple of macro notes for the LEC, I'm this is the first time I've really done this this year. I don't think I've done anything like this in any of the league so far this year. In the past, I've had a lot of success when this kind of stuff comes up, but I'm going to be taking a blanket macro approach to something. This is essentially the equivalent of thinking totals are too low in the beginning of a season in like a new sport. Anybody that best traditional sports and handicaps any traditional sports that has looked at something like the XFL and the XFL restarted, the totals were set way too high. You could just blind play every total and get there. This isn't quite as exploitable as that, but I think I've kind of found something here just kind of digging through things that I'm going to put into action. I don't think all of these are always necessarily actionable. I think sometimes it's coincidence and you end up with small sample size bias and things of that nature. You have to be careful with this kind of thing. You don't want to be too confident in something, but I think right now qualitatively, this makes sense quantitatively. It's been very exploitable and I think we have some matchups this week that kind of play toward this a little bit. The angle I'm talking about here, there's two of them. First of all, underdogs. While they haven't vastly exceeded market expectations by any means and by market expectations, I mean like the implied odds versus the actual results. I think there's only like a 3% delta, which is pretty negligible for the most part and really, you know, once you factor any sports vague, it's not really actionable. But with how tight and kind of like trade off E-trady these games have been and why that, I mean like teams are much more willing to trade a death on their team for a cross map play that gets them up on gold as a trade up opportunity. G2's made a killing on this over the last six years. It's really fundamentally, it's just good League of Legends to trade resources and trade up. It's almost like, you know, trading a 3 pointer for a 2 pointer, right? You're okay playing with pace and playing an uptempo game that's going to go a certain way if you're being more efficient and scoring more efficiently than the other team is. Similar kind of concept here. The LEC, a lot of the teams have kind of embraced that G2 ideology. So we've seen a lot of games that are not remotely close in actuality on like a gold graph or from an economical perspective or even objective perspective. We have teams like stacking dragons and amassing gigantic gold leads despite the kill score being 4 to 4 or 6 to 5 or even being down in kills. We're seeing a lot of that in the LCK. This is something that you used to see a fair amount many, many years ago, but it's kind of making a comeback. They're not the LEC. The LEC, the LEC specifically for whatever reason this season, the teams are all just kind of playing this way and it's resulted in underdogs doing exceptionally well against the kill spread. So far underdogs are 16 and 9 straight up in the 25 games we've seen so far against the kill spread. The average kill spread in the market has been plus or minus 6.58 kills. Kill spreads a 5 and a half or greater have gone 13 and 6 to the underdogs, 6 and a half or greater has gone 13 and 4 to the underdogs, 7 and a half or greater have been 10 and 4 to the dogs and any spread that's been 8 and a half or more kills is 7 and 1 to the underdogs. There's been 8 iterations of that. Now I'll admit a big chunk of these are coming from G2. G2 have been a little off their rocker. They've looked a little shaky, a little rusty, perhaps a little bit of a hangover. That's also just naturally the way this team plays. They do a lot of this kind of thing and there's been a lot of games that G2 have played where they've never really been in threat of losing, but they've definitely not given a shit about covering the kill spread. The thing you have to understand when backing kill spreads in League of Legends is this isn't a point spread in a traditional sport like football. A kill spread in League of Legends, a team can win a game of League of Legends dominantly without having a dominant kill score lead. Part of the reason I came up with tracking agnostic economy in the first place is because most people, it's because the kills don't tell the story. You have to either get the kills and convert on it or you need to convert on it or you just need to get a lot of kills. There's a lot of noise in kills because there's a lot of situations where you can set up a dive or set up a situation or maybe it's a 1v1 in the lane where you chunk the other person out. You don't necessarily kill them, but if you chunk them out and deny them like a full wave of CS and you pick up a tower plate, that's actually better than getting a kill on them very often or it's not even necessarily better but it's the same thing more or less a lot of the time. The kill is just kind of an added gravy, but if you're just killing stuff willy nilly and not actually getting anything off of it, it's actually not better than just straight up macro plays most of the time so many many years ago I kind of came up with the concept of agnostic economy, underlying gold, gold off the map, that kind of thing, utilized economy and I think that's more important. I'm kind of digressing here, but the point being the LEC I think identifies that and is playing that way and they're playing for resource denial and resource trading as opposed to strictly for kills and everything like that. There also just hasn't been a ton of sweet being victories, like lopsided games because I think there's a lot more parity in the LEC than there is in the other leagues. I think the bottom of the table is not that far away from the top of the table so anyway, straight up, 16 out of 25 games going to the dogs, coincidentally, overall kill totals have gone under in 16 out of the 25 games as well. As you'd expect, there is a very, very high correlation between kill total unders and kill spreads covering. Just like in the NFL, if you have a game with a 36 and a half point spread and one of the teams is a 13 and a half point favored, that is a razor, razor thin margin for that team to cover that spread and for the under to get home. The market is essentially projecting an extremely low score in that instance so it's that kind of idea. It's basically saying like it's going to be like 24 to 10 or 24 to, you know, whatever, 24 to 12 and a half or 13 or something like that so it's the same kind of idea. You have very, very razor thin margins for the favorites and in a league where there's razor thin margins for the favorites and there's a lot of parity in the league in general, you're obviously going to get a lot of kills, kill spreads covering. That's why it's happening. The question is, do I think it's going to continue? And for me personally, I think it is. So I'm putting this into action. The other angle here, so I'm going to be, I'll cover these all in just a second. The other angle here is the LAC has been a tower over a league. This is a prop that you can play at a lot of the offshore books, 17 out of 25 games. So far I've gone over 12 and a half towers. Part of this has been that time total overs have hit in 18 over 25 games, so we're getting longer games with a lot more aggressively traded cross mapping going on. It makes some sense that there's been 12 and a half towers. Now typically, there's not always a super strong correlation between game length and tower totals, but there's a threshold for that. Like once you get into the very, very late game, like late 30 minutes, then you end up getting a lot of those. So I think there's probably going to be some kind of regression that happens. I don't think this is going to keep hitting at this rate. It'll probably regress back to normal a little bit, but I think there's such a huge delta here that I think you want to capitalize on it while it's here. So again, 17 out of 25 games have gone over 12 and a half towers. Time total overs have hit at a huge clip. A lot of projected ones for this week are hitting, are high again. Here's the thing though. All these tower total props are priced usually around between plus 120 and minus 120 unless there's a massive favorite involved. I'm going to be playing all of the blanket, all of these all these tower total overs and underdog kill spreads that are eight and a half or better. That's going to be the blanket plays this week. And I'm doing those like almost like more or less completely blinds, like as a macro play independent of my thoughts on the individual games. So quickly, I'm going to read down these. I'm going to do the same exact thing for tomorrow. So I'll probably reference back to this post, but I'm going to probably do the same exact thing for Sunday. So for these macro angle plays for week three, for Saturday, we have BDS rogue over 12 and a half towers plus 124 for one unit rogue plus eight and a half kills at minus 112 for one unit. Hair ticks versus K gaming over 12 and a half towers at minus 109 for one unit, vitality versus giant X over 12 and a half towers at minus 101 for 1.01 units, G2 versus Carmine Corp, over 12 and a half towers at plus 101 for one unit, Carmine Corp plus eight and a half kills at minus 121 for one unit. And Madline's koi versus fanatic over 12 and a half kill towers at plus 112 for one unit and Madline's plus eight and a half kills at minus 111 for one unit. I have a couple of other plays that I'm going to talk about. I'm going to talk about these match ups as we get into it. But those are the blanket plays for the week or Saturday rather moving on to the actual early sea matches, we have BDS minus 387 on the money line against rogue plus 295. Model made this just or made this minus 355 plus 273. So not too far off market here, maybe a slight value on rogue, but not all that much. Rogue have been in bit of a struggle bus so far this summer. They've really only been competitive in two of their five games. They actually lost both the games they were competitive in and their only win was that huge, huge throw from vitality on day two that they had absolutely no business winning. For the most part in 2024, rogue have been more of a momentum team when when they can get a metagame or a patch or a couple days or a week where they can actually get into a groove and have good early game, they're actually not terrible. They close games pretty well and they can snowball games. This is still an experienced veteran lineup, but they've just had a lot of trouble getting started in the early game and they have been god awful from behind in games and unfortunately for them, they've only had a lead in thirty seven and a half percent of their games so far this season and they've kind of even they've had other situations where they actually have like small leads, they don't blow out a huge lead and they just can't close on it can't capitalize on it. It's not obviously you know as big a sample of some of the eastern leagues, but in general rogue have had just an absolutely abysmal season really their economy numbers suggest that they're not a total dumpster fire like we've seen we're seeing at some of the other leagues at the very very bottom of the table, but they are pretty close. I think right now they are probably your worst team in the league, which is kind of unbelievable to say with this roster. It's kind of a toss up between them rogue and I guess Carmine Corp even with their win so far. BDS on the other hand, they've been outstanding. Had that really really flooky win against vitality, which was again a vitality throwback in week one, just a weird week one for them thinking back on it, other than that BDS have been excellent, they've been dominant, they've been ahead in the games, they're averaging seventeen hundred plus agnostic goal per minute for the summer sample, even though it's only five games, they've just been an excellent team. Now all that said, they've been playing a lot like G2, they've been trading cross map, they've kind of been emulating them, they're willing to play the resource denial trade up game and for that reason they've been winning a lot of like closer to even score games and they have not been grading as the kill spread this season. Again I have already said I'm playing these as blanket kill spreads for bigger kill spreads for tomorrow. I will be just sticking with the macro plays that I mentioned above, which is over twelve and a half towers of plus one twenty four for one unit and the rogue plus eight and a half kills at minus twelve one twelve for one unit. Six plus one thirty against SK gaming minus one seventy two, SK gaming, they kind of got a bit of an a hundred thieves thing going on here early in the season and what I mean by that is like the the eye test is positive, not not perfect, but positive for the most part I like their decision making, but they're underlying numbers are not good, which makes me think that like maybe I'm wrong. If you look at if you isolate just the summer only, then this is a cheap price for SK and if you look at the eye test for so far in summer, this is a cheap price for SK gaming. If you look at the full season sample, this is a lot closer to a fifty fifty match and you can see that in the model that on the patreon, but that makes this a bit of an odd handicap. Another just a weird, I guess I think it's more coincidental statistic, but it's kind of just a goofy one I wanted to point out, heretics actually have the world's best closing rate, they have a perfect 100% closing rate in 2024 with a lead of any size at 20 minutes, they have any kind of lead at 20 minutes, they've won every single game. The catch is they've only had leads in 42% of their games because how poor their early game has been so SK gaming, they have a good enough closing rate, it's not elite, but it's pretty good. When you spot them a lead, they're usually pretty good and they make good decisions. These tend to spot teams leads. Where SK tend to struggle is when they get behind in games, they usually get steamrolled, so I think this is a strange one because like my gut says SK gaming, that this is a cheap price, but I also don't necessarily trust teams as big favorites that don't have elite economy numbers, especially in best of ones, so you know, the eye test might tell you a lot of good things, but the underlines are like, yeah, you don't want to get involved with the team because the reason I keep pointing to these economy statistics is because that's the foundation upon which everything is built and teams that don't have elite economy tend to be a lot shakier. When you have elite economy, it's a good foundation to build on and you have a very, very high floor. Teams with low, like worse economy, but good results tend to be highly volatile and it's not as sustainable or repeatable. So that's the reason I bring it up, I'm going to be bringing it up with another team later on too, but no play here, I'd lean SK gaming kills, right? If you forced me to pick something in this match, I'd play, I think they're like minus five and a half or six, but I don't know. If you look at just the summer, SK are strong value, but I'm not quite there with them. I don't necessarily trust teams like this with a big, as big favorites, but maybe I'm wrong. I did, however, have that over 12 and a half towers at minus one or nine for one unit as part of my blanket macro strategy for the week. Any vitality minus one fifty one on the money line, giant X plus one 24, we have model made this vitality minus one eighty four, giant X plus one fifty and with the summer only iteration minus two or three plus one sixty four, you know, giant X have been respectful, but pretty clearly bottom tier, maybe they're not quite as bad as rogue. The problem is they lead even less frequently than those teams do. They actually have the worst percentage of games with elite at 20 minutes in the five major regions outside of, I can't remember off top, I had the very bottom team in the PCS. They have a lead at 20 minutes in 28% of their games. That's a lead of any size at 20 minutes in 28% of their games. That's worse than Breone. Let that one sink in for a minute. So, you know, I think giant X kind of handled themselves better from a deficit than I think rogue do, but they're also in deficits more often than even rogue R or Carmine Corp bar. So, you know, they do okay and they remain chippy and it seems like they've gotten comfortable playing with a deficit and they're okay, like from that position. They actually, I don't know, I don't want to get distracted on this one. This is another one where I just stuck with the macro play of the over twelve and half towers at minus one on one for point one on one units. I think this is probably cheap for vitality, so I played the money line. I feel like I'm missing something here. Like, I don't, maybe I am, can somebody point out if I'm just missing something on this? Like, was there a starter announcement that I'm not missing? I couldn't find anything. Like this, this feels like it's too cheap a price. Maybe it's just recency bias because of how things have gone. Actually, vitality numbers are good, vitality, eye test have been good. Outside of that weird, there's two throws they had in week one, which was just bizarre. They've been really consistent. Even going back into spring, they've been super consistent. I really don't know why this isn't like north of minus one seventy or so. And so I took some vitality money line minus one fifty one for one unit. G2E sports minus four fifty eight against Carmine Corp plus three forty one. They made this minus four oh four error four for Carmine plus three oh six again, macro. I'm just playing the macro side of this over twelve and a half towers plus one oh one for one unit KC plus eight and a half kills that minus one twenty one for one unit of the matches that I'm playing that blanket macro play in. This is the one that I'm the most squeamish about for tomorrow. I think this is purely vibes and intuition, but like it feels like G2 have been so sketchy. This season and that at any moment they could just like flip the switch and turn back into the the monster that I know that they are. And if that's the case, they're going to be like completely smoking teams. They were generally a tower total over team in general for like the year of twenty twenty four and like even dating back over the past few years, they've been a tower total over team because they tend to trade cross map aggressively. It's like what makes them good. They're very good at that. So I'm okay with that one. The kill spread here makes me a little bit nervous. I'm still not buying Carmine Corp. Like I know they've picked up a couple wins and I think people are starting to think that they've rited the ship like qualitatively just like just watching their matches. It doesn't seem like it's any different. They still seem like a really bad fundamental team. They've just kind of like I don't say they've lucked into wins, but like they kind of have and it's kind of just been a lot of unforced errors. I'm just still skeptical. I'm not buying it with them. I still don't think they're very, very good. So I don't think, I don't think not even very, very good. I think they're just not good in general. I'm still trying to keep an open mind with them, but I kind of think they might be fraudulent still. YouTube and playing the super, you know, trading games, eight and a half is a big number. And we've seen how good that eight and a half has been doing so far this summer. So played the macro points. Miss, last match made lines, core plus 301 against Fanatic minus 396, model made Fanatic minus 165, mad plus 135, and if you look at the summer only plus 330 and minus 441, which is much more in line with the market price. When I first looked at this, my initial gut instinct was that this feels wrong. Like it feels wrong for mad to be this big an underdog to anybody, including the elite two teams. But I think like if you isolate just the summer sample, the numbers actually bear that bear out that it's like a reasonable price. And like I still can't reconcile that like this. To me, there's like no way in hell as good as Fanatic are and as much as mad lines have struggled, they've really they've had like a 1600 agnostic economy in summer, which isn't good even in like losses. That's like they should have better than that based on what we've seen so far this season. Call it like a little bit of faith. I don't know. Maybe it's blind faith. But I think we could see a bit of a dead cap balance like this. This might I'm trying to call the bottom with mad lines. This is more speculative. And I think this is the worst that we've seen this team all year. I don't think they've suddenly fallen off a cliff or that people have figured them out. You know, they were they were playing much better for the majority of the year. I think maybe they're just in a weird funk right now. Fanatic isn't exactly the best team to want to get out of a funk against. But I think I'm willing to kind of like attempt to buy a dip here on mad lines is a bit speculative. I'm playing the over 12 and a half towers at plus one 12 for one unit. The mid lines plus eight and a half kills at minus one 11 for one unit as part of the macro strategy. I'm also going to sprinkle the mad money line plus 301 here for point two units. I just think like there's this teams had down weeks over the course of this year and they've bounced back and been good and I maybe I'm trying to be a little bit too early with this but I think this roster is too good. We've seen too many good things from them for them to just suddenly like drop off a cliff and be terrible and I'm not really buying that I'm basically betting on positive regression here and that's that's the end of it. So that's it for the LEC lot of plays on the table. But again, most of them are macro plays. I only had a couple isolated plays outside of that. All right. LCS summer week two day one we got our first regular season set of best of threes in many years. That was kind of cool. We also had a nice set of opening week matches. We don't have nearly as interesting a set of matches here but something I wanted to discuss if you use a baseline of just 25 and a half kills which actually was the average kill spread like average in the LCS last week, all but two games would have gone over and almost all of them went way, way over for the league. There was an average combined kills per game of 30 in week one. Now I don't think that's just because all the LCS is all the sudden the bloody is regi- Ever I think a lot of it had to do with the specific four matchups that we got and you know those four matchups were probably primed for it. I kind of am pissed at myself that you know I didn't think about that as much but to be honest with you even if I thought about it I probably wouldn't have fired on it in week one just in the blind on the on a brand new patch after not having seen stuff for a while. But I don't think it's automatic that we're going to see this trend continue because I think we're going to get a lot more lopsided matchups here in week two, we got four pretty close matchups in week one and that is certainly not the case this week. But I do think it's something to monitor and I think if you are more aggressive in this kind of thing I think in general if you see a competitive matchup the LCS is probably going to be an over league until the markets adjust to it accordingly. So I'm not playing blanket overs in this league like I am in the LEC with the kills reds and tower total overs but I think in closer matchups this is probably something to make a case against and if you can't make a case against it just back the over first matchup cloud nine minus five hundred wow minus one and a half maps on minus one twenty three against immortals plus three sixty seven on the money line the plus one has a plus one or two in the minus one and a half is a plus nine thirteen. You guys know how I feel about cloud nine bullish Dignitas punched them in the mouth in week one I don't think they look particularly dominant or flawless or anything like that in their debut with this lineup but and they had to earn their win for sure Dignitas challenge them but I think like I still think they're going to be good I still think they're going to be the best from just a just forward looking a little bit before projecting a bit. The other thing here is this looks like a huge price it is a huge price I'm not overpaying for it but you have to remember when you remove best of ones the variance gets reduced so you're going to have a lot fewer like flooky results when you go from best of one to best of three and even less so when you go from best of three to best of five. So I think that that really helps the good teams and hurts the poor teams because you're not going to be able to mise wins as easily so you are really starting with a baseline of making a case against a favorite in most situations immortals don't really have enough going on to make me interested in going against cloud nine here at the same time I'm not really going to overpay to back them either my gut tells me cloud nine sweep this just take the minus one and a half maps I don't really want to overpay for it model made this price closer to plus one thirty so I'm not going to I'm not going to mess with that no place from me in this one and I think this is probably going to be a more lopsided match so I don't like the kill total overs in this one either next up we have one hundred thieves minus two thirty nine on the money line the minus one they have maps of plus one forty six against Dignitas plus one ninety two on the money line minus or plus one as a minus one seventy nine minus one as a plus five fifteen model made dignity or one hundred thieves a much bigger favorite of minus three fifty two dignitas is plus three oh seven one hundred thieves much bloodier team doesn't appear if they've changed their ways on that front Dignitas showed quite a lot of fighting as cloud nine and I obviously consider cloud nine a lot better than one hundred thieves at least for now if we buy that hundred thieves or that Dignitas are indeed improves and are indeed better I think that's totally reasonable to expect I liked the improvements made they made to the roster I was generally optimistic relative to market on this team going into the season and they showed well in week one if you buy that I would lean toward their side in this match not only because of that but because one hundred thieves are more of a volatile team just the way they play is more volatile again kind of underlines aren't necessarily great not terrible either but uh I don't really trust their decision making sometimes like on a game to game basis I would never trust the team as large favorites all season long I haven't been trusting them as big favorites but I have liked them as big underdogs this is a pretty big spot for them like they're a big favorite in this contest I wouldn't mess with them on that side they're way too volatile for me but um if you trust the numbers yeah a hundred thieves is the play here I am in this case the volatility of this team scares me away a little bit so I'm not all that interested I would lean to the Dignitas side of things but my favorite play in this is that I think this could be competitive and one hundred thieves are an over team obviously their totals are set higher than the leagues but I'm playing map one and map two over 28 and a half kills at plus 107 for one unit each in this contest I think if Dignitas are competitive and chippy and they they aren't just rolling over and dying like we were seeing a lot of times in spring that I think this is going to be like actually a very competitive and back and forth and and chippy match and uh should be entertaining that's going to be it for me I will be back tomorrow with the LPL and LCK as well as the LAC and the LCS best of luck and screw DRX for juking me uh for those that don't know I was you know I said I mentioned at the top that I was watching between games I've been kind of stopping and starting and recording and watching this LCK series this is the third time this week that I've been just ankle breaking juked by a team that has been showing good in summer and then just completely no shows when I show any faith in them to continue delivering first anyone's now I didn't actually back anyone's legend so I only really bet two of these three teams anyone anyone's legend turned into a pumpkin against ultra prime EDG complete no showed in their match and now DRX the this DRX DRX just lost an auction two to one I don't think this was this was more draft specific I think DRX made them made things way too difficult for themselves with these drafts but uh just it feels bad like for those that don't know like for many many years I was the guy that was like nope don't buy it need to see more I was patient I was I was a skeptic and I was never trying to rush and be early to market on stuff almost ever and I don't think I was super early on this like everything we've seen so far all the evidence pointed to X and we just got why and I got why three times this week flip tails on all three of these and that sucks but oh my god it's been a rough week it's been a rough handicapping week I've had a great like great week in real life just rough handicapping week so hopefully we can turn it around hopefully these these plays in the L C L C N L C S can help us flip this on the script it's a marathon not a sprints remember it's a long season and uh hopefully uh we can start getting some of these right because it's been a kind of a run bad week anyway enough bitch in a moment for me that's gonna be it I will see you all tomorrow or later today have a good one and best of luck
