Bing Predicts says that EHOME will win The International

The search engine Bing is now getting involved in esports via Bing Predicts and major esports competition The International. 

Bing Predicts, which has in the past correctly called the outcome of the Scottish Referendum and incorrectly called the EU Referendum, has attempted to determine the winner of the Dota 2 competition which kicked off on Monday.

Bing Predicts has stated that the overall winner of The International 2016 will be EHOME. Their predicted path is that they’ll beat Alliance in the Upper Bracket Quarters, defeat Evil Geniuses in the Semis, and Wings in both the Upper Bracket Final and Grand Final.

This has however already come crashing down after EHOME lost to Evil Geniuses. As such they’ve now fallen into the Lower Bracket meaning that their path to the Grand Final has become trickier.

Paddy Power currently has EHOME priced at 6/1 making them the third favourites after Wings Gaming and Evil Geniuses. The Bing Predicts blog said of what went into building its analysis model:

“What sets Dota 2 apart from your typical sport (or esport) is that team rosters constantly change. Players shuffle every three months, and because of this, it is hard for any team to stay at the top of their game for a year or longer. Even a few months can make all the difference.

“To account for the frequent lineup changes, we built a predictive model that tracks team performance as well as the career performance of individual players, based on in-game features (gold per minute, experience per minute, etc.) and external features (win rate, etc.). Players who are strong individually may not collaborate well, and while it is difficult to predict it before the players are paired together for the first time, our model computes changes in key statistics for each player and each team after a roster shuffle to quickly update predictions.”

Bing Predicts is also making match by match predictions, and this was its forecast for matches on August 10th..

Of these results it called Fnatic and Wings correctly, with EHOME going down to Evil Geniuses and Team Liquid narrowly beating Newbee.

Of its initial predictions for Day One on August 8th, it correctly called half of the six fixtures with wins from Fnatic, Team Liquid and MVP Phoenix upsetting the engine’s formula. Granted, the win by MVP Phoenix over OG was a surprise to the vast majority of viewers.

The overall winning team will receive $8.8m (£6.7m) as a reward after crowdfunding for this year’s competition reached a historic high by hitting over $20m in prize pools. The second team will receive $3.3m (£2.5m), and the third placed side $2.1m (£1.6m), with the remaining funds spread amongst the runners up.