The first couple of days of TI10 main event fantasy are going to be quite easy. There are no potential repeating teams, and we don’t need to guess whether a team needs to play extra matches.

The last day of the group stage is going to have less regular games, but there is always a chance of tiebreakers, so we have to factor those in. Luckily, some of the top fantasy earners are also among the players with the highest chance of tiebreakers.

After two days it is still incredibly hard to say who is going to emerge from TI10 victorious, as teams are testing out a lot of different strategies and heavy favorites lose to underdogs. However, while the overall power levels between teams are still being figured out, there are now clear runaways in terms of fantasy scorers, so our job is a little bit easier this time around.

With the first day behind us, we now have a little bit more to go on when selecting our roster for Day 2. Once again, the selection is going to be from teams that play three series tomorrow and once again we are going to concentrate on heavy tournament favorites for core roles, but select statistically best performing supports, regardless of team standing.

Once again the International group stage has one group playing more matches in a given day, making some of the calculations easier. Day one is Group A, so we are going to be picking exclusively from the nine teams in it.

Whereas tournament and hero predictions are firmly based on stats and it is easy to stay objective, the team and player predictions are often influenced by our own perceptions. We will try our best to remain impartial and pick our predictions based solely on statistics, but that is not necessarily the most effective approach. So for most categories, several viable options are going to be presented, from which you will be able to pick the one you feel is the best.

Predictions are especially hard this year. Few DPC tournaments, problems with international competition in general and multiple small patches after the last big event all make guesses unreliable at best. We will still try to do our best to provide the reasoning behind our picks and oftentimes discuss the alternatives.

Coming into TI 10 there is one team that will draw the attention of every single Dota fan to the event. OG, despite a somewhat quiet 2020 season, enters the event as two time defending champions. Their quest for a third title, likely to be an unbeatable record, is more convoluted this time around.

There are no teams more interesting to watch than Dark Horses. Teams that can seemingly take it all, upsetting the biggest favorites. This TI, the dark horses are especially interesting: they are in this category for very different, sometimes polarly opposite reasons.