Getting Recognized in the DotA Community.

I'm not a big name, I'm not the best player and I'm rarely recognized by anyone. I can't say I don't care, obviously I do care - I aim to become the best player out there, it's a tough goal to have, but I think I'll be able to stand my ground.
However, some players will recognize me. Some will see me as an idiot, some will not care, some does not have an opinion, others see another random "high skilled" player. Other see a friend. One of the way to get recognized in the DotA community is simply to be a nice guy, play your game and do your best always.
My biggest way to improve have always been my way of thinking, I think outside the box. At times I feel like I see the game in a completely different way. I've always played with a very specific mindset: "If I lose, it's my fault - Not my teams, I need to improve. I need to be able to win alone if it's needed"
This might not be true. Sometimes you can't do anything, sometimes your team is simply doing bad. But avoid thinking about your team, especially in public games. It doesn't help flaming your team, it'll only reduce their self-esteem and they'll get worse.
I know quite a few good players, I also know mediocre players that could be good players if they would believe in themself. To be the best, you have to believe in yourself, every game you play you'll have to say to yourself: "I'm the best, I'm better than Dendi, I'm better than Maelk and Arstyle is purely the biggest noob and I can own him easily." (This is obviously not what I think, but it's what you have to make yourself believe during the game). I've played against pro teams, I've seen my teammates tilt totally due to simply seeing the name of the opponent, those players are not gods, they're beatable.

Anyone is beatable, everyone can improve and you can ALWAYS, ALWAYS get better.
There's a lot of ways to improve yourself, obviously there's self-esteem but you'll also have to put yourself in the place of the enemy, what would you do in their situation. How would you react? If you can respond to their move before they even think about doing it, then you'll succeed.
Some people might say DotA is about one small thing 'Being the fastest to find the most logical move' I'm not exactly sure if I agree. If you can understand the logic of your enemy you'll be able to counter it, therefore having a weird logic will simply give you more power in DotA which means you should ALWAYS think outside the box, use weird strats, use different heroes and always be able to pull off something different than your last game.
DotA is the most complex game in the world, there's so many possibilitys and so many ways to understand the game.

-Ivz

As always, feel free to message me on IRC. I'm Ivz @ Quakenet :)

"How to Chen" by Ivz

I've been working with Min to make a video of me playing chen, I'm trying to explain my thoughts on chen and how I play him.

Part 1 - Chen with Ivz and Min

Part 2 - Chen with Ivz and Min

Part 3 - Chen with Ivz and Min

If you want to contact me feel free to write to me on IRC - I'm Ivz @ Quakenet

-Ivz

Philosophy and DotA

I believe you need something to live for in your life, it's not a secret what I've chosen. I've chosen a game that I find endlessly interesting and exciting. It's DotA. Alongside with DotA I'm also going to highschool. My main classes are English, Society Science and Philosophy. Out of those three subjects my favourite one is philosophy, I've always been thinking a lot about everything and I've always wanted to understand what other people think.

This leads me back to DotA, thinking and understanding your enemy is the best way to win a game, if you understand your enemies next move then you'll be able to foresee it and do a countermove. This also means if you want to be unbeatable you'll have to do things that the enemy can't predict, every move has a countermove therefore you'll need to do things your enemy wont think of.

The reason my favourite game is DotA and my favourite class is philosophy is because those two things have so many things in common. There's endless ways to play a DotA game as there's endless ways to think about how the world works. The most common thing to do in DotA right now is push, as I see it the most succesful teams currently do clash oriented lineups with heroes that have the possibility of pushing effectively and fast after the clash. This is the reason why heroes such as leshrac are rising in popularity.

Inside my head I do sometimes try to take DotA and split it apart, I take all the pieces of DotA, remove the uneccesary ones and try to find the core. I've figured out the core is to kill the enemies base (their ancient) therefore this sort of gameplay makes a lot of sense but it's also very obvious that this is not the only way to win. As I've said before it's best to do the unpredictable. To do unpredictable things in DotA you'll have to step away from the "top tier heroes". Doing this is hard, it's very hard, you'll very quickly be tempted to take heroes such as shadow shaman, leshrac etc. the reason you want to do this is because you've seen others do it with great succes, you might have tried this yourself and had great succes therefore it's very hard to step outside of the box that is created by the proffesional teams.

I've always wanted to make a project with 5 committed players that agree with me and also want to take the game apart and make it all over. I want to think the game all over, rethink everything and I'll then get down to why you pick supports, why you get carries and why you push. To become the best DotA player of all time it's neccesary to understand why you do certain things.

I've always thought DotA in a rather "irrational" way, at least others would say so. But as everyone else I'm not perfect, I want to play the game in a special way and that's the main reason why I avoid hardcarries. As most teams play right now they're not very neccesary to the game. The best carries are the carries that peak in the midgame, heroes such as riki, mirana etc. carries that can attend the game early. I want to think irrational thoughts, I wanna get out of the box and I want to invent new strategies.

-Ivz

Please leave a comment! :)
Feel free to contact me on IRC if you want to talk to this, I'm Ivz @ Quakenet and I idle in #TPOC.DotA

A DotA Pro in the Making

My name is Ivan, I'm a 18 year old student that lives in Copenhagen (Denmark). I seem as a fairly normal guy, I have a girlfriend and I live a quite normal life.

The difference between me and most other people as my age is: I know what I wanna do, I know what I want to grow up to and I know what my goals are. I wanna be a proffesional DotA player, I wanna be the best and I want to beat the best. There's nothing wrong with saying this and it's probably hard to understand how determined I am in reaching my goal.

Ingame I go under the name of Ivz, I'm a support player in the team named Two Pudge One Cup, my signature heroes are chen and enchantress.
I try to practice as much as possible, which means close to everyday, it depends how much time I use per day, in the weekends I can use up to 12+ hours and in the weekdays it's usually about 7 hours. You might think "woah, that's a lot of DotA" but inside I feel like I wanna play more, everygame just makes me more hyped for the next one.

In the last few days I've been spending a lot of time with a player going under the nick of "MinSikChoi", Min is a great guy, I like him and I think he's got talent - He's not very good at the game yet, but he hopefully will be. I told him I thought it could be funny if he started a blog about his progress towards becoming a very good (eventually proffesional) player, he didn't like the idea so I thought to myself: "Then I'll do it"

In this blog I'll be describing my process towards becoming a pro player, I'll do a few analyzes of my games and I'll be posting most of my replays from practices with my team.

My name is Ivan and I'm a DotA pro in the making.
-Ivz