This match-up starts on Friday, December 28, 2018 – 13:00 UTC+8.
After two weeks of rest since the completion of group stage in the Dota2 Professional League Season 6 (2018 S2), Invictus Gaming (IG) will be playing the first match in Playoffs against IG Vitality (IG.V).
Looking at recent professional matches IG played Flaming Cyborg and Winning Gaming in H-CUP Season 11 on Christmas, their draft was great following acquisitions of Outworld Destroyer and Phantom Assassin in their match against Flaming Cyborg along with Axe.
Obviously Outworld Destroyer and Phantom Assassin needed space in early game, however the Axe pick was to secure space for them because Axe able to initiate on enemy with only Blink Dagger, Vanguard is a plus for him to survive after ganking enemies.
Axe did a amazing job in that game by blocking the creep wave in bottom lane (IG was on Dire side that game, bottom lane is their aggressive lane). He had his Vanguard by 5-minute mark, followed with Phase Boots by 7-minute mark and the most important item – Blink Dagger before 13-minute mark.
However, their mid laner Outworld Destroyer in that game was heavily harassed by Drow Ranger, Drow Ranger had a 2 level gap advantage higher than Outworld Destroyer.
Despite Axe ganked and tried to create space for their cores, Drow Ranger out-farmed in that game and had a golds per minute up to 633 by the end of the game.
In their game against Winning Gaming, they drafted Tidehunter and Anti-Mage which were a great draft because Tidehunter is a hero that very tanky and enemies have to commit a lot of time and skills in order to kill him.
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Anti-Mage is a hero with blink ability, it is very hard to successfully kill him in a gank, using the advantage of both heroes durability and tankiness, Winning Gaming unable to get the map control and always had trouble of countering the split push from Anti-Mage in that game.
IG.V on the other side was doing quite bad on the same day against Winning Gaming, they picked the strongest combo in this meta of the patch- Phantom Assassin and Magnus while Winning Gaming drafted classic combo- Gyrocopter and IO.
Based on the draft of cores, we would give higher chance for IG.V to win because Phantom Assassin 1 strike could sent IO free ticket back to the fountain.
However their inability to drag the game and create space for Phantom Assassin was their reason to lose the game.
Invictus Gaming vs IG Vitality betting prediction
After analysing the drafting abilities and recent performance from both squads, we give IG a 60% chance to win this match-up.
Our recommendation is to go low and bet on IG to win the game at better than $1.28 at GG Bet.