Another night of quality esports coming up this Thursday night and our expert Micharel Lee is back to take a look at some of the key matchups across the CS:GO and DOTA2 titles below.
Esports Betting Tips: Thursday, July 30th
Rooster vs Paradox
LPL Pro League Season 5
The Grand Finals of the LPL Pro League Season 5 will serve us with a Best-of-five match between two Australian sides, Rooster and Paradox.
Rooster have been awarded a one map advantage as an upper bracket winner, which may seem like a huge advantage, but in reality, this is a marginal bonus at most, considering there was no shortage of fixtures where the lower bracket finalists won games like this.
Rooster are on a seven-game winning streak, however, most of their wins came against the middle of the pack teams such as Paradox, TRUCKED WITH ATTITUDE, Downfall, Chiefs, Mako and Ground Zero. They, however, boast with 80% win rate across the past three months, which is an amazing record for hold for a team that fields mostly unknown players.
Paradox, on the other end, won only 54.5% of their matches across the past three months and are entering this match with two straight wins against TRUCKERS WITH ATTITUDE and Mako. Similarly to Rooster, Paradox are known for losing games against top-tier teams but are also prone to losing matches to low-ranked teams like VERTEX, Bantz, Airborne.
Rooster should have a huge mental edge over Paradox in this match, considering they have beaten Paradox in 11 maps out of 13 played. Even though it's true most of those games were somewhat close, I can't make myself trust the current roster of Paradox, who has been underperforming for a while. Bet on Rooster to cover the handicap!
Cellular Game vs Blaze
Moon Studio Asian League
The amateur roster of Cellular Game will play their second game of the Moon Studio Asian League against Blaze which is billed as a one-sided match and I don't see how it can end in any other way than Blaze coming out ahead.
Not only are Blaze at least a semi-professional team that has already made some noise in the Tier-3 of Dota2 competition, but they have also already defeated Cellular less than a week ago during the Moon Studio Asian League qualifiers.
The match in question was as one-sided as it can get and even though Cellular looked at least somewhat decent in game two of the series, their 10 kills to 15 does not paint the full picture of how that match ended. The fact of the matter is that Blaze won the final map of the series with 10k+ gold lead, which makes it clear Cellular lack a proper macro-play approach.
Cellular won only three games out of last five played and even those came against The New Top and twice against Galaxy Racer Esports, who are both amateur teams like themselves. Trust the established quality and bet on Blaze to take down Cellular for the second time in a week.
Galaxy Racer Esports vs iG Vitality
Moon Studio Asian League
Galaxy Racer Esports are a newly formed team that has played only four games together and won two of them. They have defeated QuestionMark and CLOWNS.KR, but lost twice to Cellular Gaming.
IG Vitality, on the other hand, won only one game out of their last five. They have defeated 496 Gaming (2-0), but lost to PSG.LGD (1-2), Invictus Gaming (1-2), Team Sirius (1-2) and Sparking Arrow Gaming (1-2). While iG Vitality’s record is not too convincing, they deserve some slack for it, since they played some of the strongest Chinese Dota2 teams and even managed to win maps against SAG, IG and PSG.LGD.
The betting odds on this match heavily favor iG Vitality, but I still find them a bit too high. A lot will have to go wrong for iG Vitality to lose here and considering they are used to playing A-Tier teams, defeating an amateur roster such as Galaxy Racer Esports should be a walk in the park for them.
