#usumgt4540

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Tip 5: Use your resources

This tip is not going to be as exciting as the other tips but still really important. I have mentioned things like dotabuff.com, opendota.com, pvgna.com and twitch before in my tips but never in detail. Using these sights can give you a competitive advantage against your opponents, and most of all help you learn the game more quickly. These website help you track stats so you know which areas of the game you need to work on. From farming on a carry, to wards and supporting, these give you tips and tricks to become more successful. When using youtube and twitch, watch pro players that play the position you love to play to see how they play specific heroes, and why they make the moves that they do throughout the course of the game. This in my opinion is the quickest way to learn your role and favorite heroes. It also can help you learn the pace of the game, how to split push, how to read the map, and how to ward and de-ward. My favorite position to play is the offlane and I watch EG.Universe almost every day to see which heroes are meta and how to play them. That was one of the biggest reasons I became successful because it helped reveal strengths about some heroes that I didn’t know how to capitalize on. Little things like when playing Dark Seer, to use surge on yourself while you initiate a vacuum-wall of replica combo so you can speedily get away from defenders that may try to stop you from escaping. Using all these resources and paying close attention to how pros play positions will really benefit you in the long run. Just make sure that when you watch their videos that you are watching one when the pro is playing to win a game and not just casually playing for the hell of it.

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Tip 4: Get Better at CS

For those that don’t understand what CS, it stands for creep score. Another commonly known term is last hitting. I watch a lot of pros and players with high MMR’s on twitch and the thing they say is the most important to practice is last hitting. If you look at dotabuff or opendota a large area of difference between good players and low skill players are their last hitting efficiency throughout the game. This doesn’t mean only the core positions. (Note: as a support don't take last hits unless you know for sure your core can't get it) If you have time as a support to be alone in a lane it is common to lose focus and start clicking away at creeps and missing last hits. The more last hits you get the more experience and gold you get for your team. Make it a goal that no matter what position you are playing that you are going to get every single last hit you can without dying. That means when you are alone in a lane its great practice for you get every single last hit. It sounds so simple and that is because it is. But it is commonly forgotten by lower skilled players to really buckle down and focus on getting those last hits throughout the entirety of the game. Some additional tips are to play only a few heroes and really master their hit animation. Just spam these heroes over and over and get really good at practicing last hitting. You will be surprised at how much easier games get when you maximize efficiency by getting all the last hits you can. Some target goals for cores are to get 50-70 last hits by the 10 minute mark. Pros aim for 70-100 from what i have seen recently. Of course this varies depending on how difficult the lane is. Not dying is more important than getting a CS so use common sense to determine the difficulty of the lane you are up against. But if you want to get better at the game the best skill you can practice is last hitting. So practice, practice, practice!!

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Tip 2: The Power of Wards, Sentry Wards, and Dust.

It doesn’t matter if you are a core or a support you are going to need good vision in order to win games. If your support can’t afford them, then you buy one or two to help the team. It sounds counter intuitive because a carry buying a ward is money that could be spent on items, however in the trenches of dota 2 a lot of supports have a carry mentality. Good vision helps your team avoid smoke ganks, watch support movement, look at enemy items, and all around keeps your team alive. Having good vision also helps you see where and when enemy supports place wards. This is super important because if you can take away the enemies vision you have the advantage to smoke gank and get kills to further item progression into the mid/late game. 

Lets go over this idea in more detail. Why would it be important to avoid smoke ganks? If the enemy takes the time to group up and smoke as a team, and you see where it happens. This means that you can avoid getting killed by leaving that part of the map and farming in a safer area. What this accomplishes is that you are getting gold while the enemy team is not farming because they are looking for you. This also means that you are not losing gold by having a teammate feed gold and experience by dying to the smoke gank which gives you a slight advantage over the opponent. 

Why is it important to see what items the enemy has? Lets say you have a deep ward up in the enemy offlane and you have not seen the enemy Axe in a while. You are pushing the tower and you see Axe walking towards that tower and you notice a blink dagger in his inventory. You can let your team know that Axe has a blink and that it is time to back up. You don’t want to get caught under a tower with an axe with a blink dagger. You can also see other important power spikes suck as veil on Ember Spirit, Bloodstone on Storm Spirit, Radience on Spectre. All this information gives your team a chance to prepare for power spikes in the enemies plan.

Why is it important to watch support movement? If you can spot a support roaming to gank it means that you have a better chance of surviving the gank which means the support is wasting time and experience trying to get a kill on you. By surviving and not giving into the strength of a support gank you are coming out on top. In the early game, most supports will be looking for gank opportunities to increase the amount of levels and gold they can get in the early game. If this happens you risk the chance of a support having the ability to take away your ward vision, buy early teamfight items, and getting your ancient pushed into the ground.

**SPECIAL NOTE ABOUT RIKI

Riki is the bane of most players existence in low skill games. Riki is almost always able to snowball into this annoying beast that your team cannot control. How to counter this is DUST AND SENTRIES! Instead of buying a salve at the start of a game, buy dust and wait at the top gold rune spot for Riki. He is going to end up there a lot of the time to try and snag that rune for his team. If you hide in the trees and wait for the game to start, come out with 5 seconds left and dust that hero, you are going to kill him! He just gave your carry gold and you got gold and XP! Now what do you do with that precious gold? Buy sentires!!!! Put a sentry mid for your mid player so riki does not gank him and put on in your safe lane so your safe lane is safe. Riki gets all his advantage from being invisible and if you can see him coming towards you it means a gank is coming. Yes you are going to be more poor than normal buying sentries and yes it is super annoying. But you will find if you shut Riki down in the early game, it is almost impossible for him to recover. If your team wants to push towers make sure a sentry ward is down by you as you push. This way Riki can’t walk into all of you and silence 3 of you and turn a teamfight when you could just focus him and kill him before that happens. 

I hope me explaining some of these tips helps and more are coming in the future!!

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Tip 1: Pick what your team needs, not what you want to play.

*Again this blog is for people who are new to Dota 2 or those who want to get out of the bottom trenches of Dota. 

When I first started playing Dota I struggled with the concept of a good team composition. I always wanted to play the carry and I would pick a carry almost every time. I thought that it was okay to do that at first. I won some matches and I lost some matches so it didn’t seem that supporting was necessary because almost every game I played ended up being 50 minutes long, or more, and if your team had more carries on it then you normally won. However as I started increasing my journey to increase my MMR I found that I was losing games a lot earlier and it was frustrating. I quickly learned that when you start to play against better players, that you need to have a good team composition or you will lose sub 30 minutes. An ideal team has 3 cores and 2 supports. Generally one of the cores need to be an initiator, while the other two are your safe lane carry and mid lane carry. Your supports need to be babysitting the cores and ensuring that you provide them with what they need to be successful. This is just common knowledge when playing Dota so it shouldn’t be to hard to understand. If you already have 3 cores on the team, the worst thing to do is pick another core. A lot of people in the Dota 2 community hate to play support, especially those at a lower MMR. However I personally believe that good supports have a larger impact on the game than a core. They need to have good map awareness, survive with little gold, have incredible positioning and quick reflexes (Ideally everyone on the team has these skills, but most of the time that is not the case). I raised my MMR by just by learning how to support correctly. I went from the trenches of 2k to  3.5k MMR. If you have good rotations, TP support, good vision, are buying dust and sentries for invisible hero’ and succesfully rotating, all these things can win the early game and give your team the boost it needs to take towers, accumulate gold, and purchase those important items. By picking what your team needs and knowing the role that you chose, you will already be at a a slight advantage over the other team.

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Peanut Butter Chocolate Bars

This classic & simple dessert will satisfy your cravings better than a Recee’s. 

Peanut Butter Chocolate Bars

Ingredients

1 cup of melted butter 1 1/2 cups powdered sugar 1 1/2 cups creamy peanut butter 2 cups graham crackers, crushed 1 1/2 cups semi-sweet chocolate chips

Instructions

Spray a 9 x 13 pan

Mix butter, powdered sugar, 1 cup of the peanut butter and graham cracker in a large bowl

Layer into the pan

Add the remaining 1/2 cup of peanut butter and chocolate chips to a small bowl

Microwave in 15 second intervals until fully melted

Pour onto the peanut layer and smooth with spatula

Let firm in refrigerator for 1 hour

To serve, cut into squares and enjoy!

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Post All-Star Stretch: Jazz Edition

After two weeks of rumors circling around Jeff Teague or Ty Lawson being traded to the Jazz, a rather anti-climatic deal sending Shelvin Mack to the Jazz for a 2nd round pick was the only Jazz deal.  As we already know, the Jazz are 100% invested in Dante Exum.  The thought process around getting a veteran point guard to come to the Jazz was that he would help nurture Exum for a year or two.  I liked the idea, but in typical Jazz fashion the trade deadline came and went without fireworks.

Shelvin Mack has been averaging 3.9 ppg and 1.6 apg this season with the Atlanta Hawks, while shooting a paltry 14% from 3pt land.  Just in case anyone thinks that was a typo, it’s not. 14%.  Mack is verging on being a veteran, with 6 years in the league under his belt.  But he’s never come close to being an All-Star, such as the likes of Teague and Lawson, but he’s a solid 6^3 back-up point guard with deceiving strength. We’ll see in the upcoming week how Snyder decides to implement him into the system.

Week 1 Post All-Star Break

The Jazz didn’t have an impressive showing against the Wizards in their first game back from the break.  The kryptonite last night was turnovers.  The Jazz had 21 turnovers in the first 3 quarters alone (we average 14 per game). This led to John Wall highlight worthy fast breaks that countered any and all runs the Jazz had in the 3rd and 4th quarter.

I don’t think the winning streak the Jazz had going into the All-Star break was a fluke.  A little rust after a week off is common in the NBA. Let’s hope this upcoming week shows the Jazz back into the form they had the weeks leading up to All-Star break.

This week isn’t going to be easy for the Jazz, though.  We have back-to-back-to-back games yesterday through Saturday.  This is the first time an NBA team has had a triple back-to-back since 2012.  The reason this happened was of course because the Wizards game was postponed due to weather. As if a triple back-to-back isn’t hard enough, the Jazz will travel over 3,000 miles over this 3-day span, which is the most miles travelled by an NBA team in a 3-day span since 1992.  This coupled with the games being against decent teams is worrisome.  Don’t be surprised if the Jazz end up losing 3 straight in a row.  The Celtics are coming into tonight’s game as third in the East with a 32-23 record.  After that, the Jazz head to Portland to play the Trailblazers.  Damian Lillard loves to crush the Jazz, so we’ll see how these games play out.

  Upcoming Week Predictions (including tonight’s game): 1-3

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Are the Jazz the 8th best team in the NBA?

Bleacher Report released their weekly NBA Power Rankings this morning and lo and behold the streaking Jazz came in at 8th.  If there’s one thing I love in life it’s the Jazz winning basketball games, and winning back-to-back-to-back-etc games.  But I hate getting caught up in midseason power rankings that show teams dropping and jumping double digits spots in the span of two weeks.  The Jazz have (finally) been healthy for the last few weeks and it’s shown on the defensive end.  We have been the best defensive team in the NBA since the return of Gobert and Favors to starter minutes.  But let’s hold the horses on saying that we’re currently better than the Hawks, Trail Blazers and Heat.  

If we look at the winning seven game win streak the Jazz had going into All-Star Weekend, SIX of those wins came against sub .500 win teams.  Six.  The only win against a team with a winning record was the Mavs, which was a buzzer beater win, albeit a take your pants off and run around the house screaming with joy buzzer beater win.  But the Jazz just haven’t shown they can put a beat down on a really good team yet, and until I see that I’m not putting all my chips in on the Jazz making their way to the 5th seed of the playoffs by April.

  Point Guard Help

The trade deadline is fast approaching, Feb. 18, and all of the trade talk surrounding the Jazz has been about point guard help.  Beat writers from around the country think that the Jazz are looking to bring in a solid point guard and sign them for 5 years.  Any real Jazz fan knows that those doofuses don’t know Jazz basketball. The Jazz have high hopes for our 2014 5th pick Dante Exum and we aren’t about to throw in the towel on him because he pulled a muscle, or whatever.  If the Jazz do pick up a point guard, which I believe they may, it will be what we call a “bridge” pick up.  This means a veteran like point guard who we can sign to a relatively cheap 2 year deal that can bridge the gap (see what I did there) between Exum coming back from injury and turning into the player we all hope he can.  Players I believe could be this:  Jeff Teague, George Hill, other point guard that is bellow par what we actually want but since it’s the Jazz it’ll probably be this….

 Can the Jazz have a post All-Star record as smashingly beautiful as last year’s?

This question intrigues me. Last year, the Jazz played a lot of game against teams that were either resting players or had players on minutes-restrictions going into the playoffs.  These wins on paper looked awesome, but in reality didn’t weren’t as good as one might think.  This year I don’t see teams resting their players as much going into the playoffs, except Golden State, because each other team is fighting going to be fighting for spots in the playoffs.  The Jazz are better this year, though, even without Exum, and I could see them making a push that keeps them above .500.  The Jazz went 19-10 post All-Star break last year and I’m predicting an 18-12 finishing record, placing the Jazz somewhere between the 7th and 8th seed.

 This Weeks Prediction: 1 - 0

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Snow Day

Gotta love snow days. The Jazz finished their road trip early this week with the postponement of their game against Washington originally scheduled for Saturday. This is the first time the Jazz have had a game postponed since 2003 when Memphis couldn’t make it out of Portland in time for the game due to snow. The Jazz v. Wizards game will be postponed until an unannounced date later this year.

Couple thoughts on the Jazz this week:

1.     Stifle Tower Back To His Old Ways

Rudy recorded 18 points to go with 18 rebounds in the Jazz’s 109-82 win over the lowly Lakers. Or should I capitalize that and say Lowly Lakers (they’re 9-35). Rudy is still wearing a knee brace as he plays but he is back up to his average starter minutes of 33 per game.

Two things I’m still waiting on for Rudy this season. If I’m not mistaken we have yet to see a Rudy Salute (wth!?)!!! Two, that jumper he worked on with Holger Geschwindnerfindertinderwingy, Dirk’s old shooting coach. Boy, would I love to see Rudy toss up an old 13-foot jumper. Some day, some day.

 2.     Derrick? Are you dead?

The question every Jazz fan has been asking for the past three weeks. We haven’t seen Favors since Dec. 23, and there’s a part of me that wonder what’s going on here. I may just be speculating and stirring up drama, but I don’t see back spasms keeping a player out for the better part of a month and for the foreseeable future. So, does Favors possibly want out?

This wouldn’t be the first time a team has played the “oh, he’s just been injured” card when a player is basically refusing to be played until he’s traded. The Jazz haven’t been playing as well as the media hyped them at the end of last year when we finished out the post all-star break with a 19-10 record. At the midway point of the season we’re 19-24 and standing one spot out of the playoffs, just behind the Kings (THE KINGS). If Favors does want out I wouldn’t blame him. Although, he doesn’t catch me as the type of player that would pull a stunt like this and leave his teammates in the dust. At the same time, he got gypped last year in the all-star voting, which I would presume was the result of coming from a small market team that wasn’t performing well. It’s difficult to get your name in the spotlight with those two situations.

 3.     Home Stand

We’re coming up on a do or die situation for the Jazz. Our next six games are at home against mostly subpar teams (Pistons, Hornets, Timberwolves, Bulls, Nuggets, Bucks). I’d love to see the Jazz finally win three games in a row this season. But, more importantly, the Jazz need to make a solid run at this point in the season. The Western Conference is weak this year and even so the Jazz are a spot out of the playoffs. With a relatively easy home-stand in the next two weeks the Jazz could position themselves in a nice position before all-star weekend.

Quick note from around the league. David Blatt, Cleveland’s euro head coach, was let go early this morning and assistant coach Tyronn Lue signed a three-year deal as Cleveland’s new head coach. This doesn’t surprise me one bit. Lebron and company have all made cryptic statements during the last season and a half downplaying Blatt’s ability to coach a championship caliber team. Also, Lebron and his agent have both publicly stated their little love affair of Tyronn Lue, so no surprise there.

 See you all next week. Go Jazz.