World Championships 2014 Blue Side Win Rate
After watching the Cloud 9 vs. Najin Shield rematch, I came to the realization that North America's greatest chance of getting out of the Quarterfinals successfully died on a coin flip. Knowing that Cloud 9 suffers while not on blue side, due to Hai's champion pool being easier to attack when C9 is on red side, I found it odd that C9 should be the only team to suffer from such a situation. So, I looked at the blue side vs. red side win rate throughout the entirety of the group stages. First, I found that, out of 50 games played during the group stage, blue side won 33 times. That's a 66% win rate for all of group stages. But, let's just focus on perhaps the most even group in terms of skill: Group D. Group D was the only group to have its first seed drop 2 games over the course of the group and, even though KaBum was at a clear disadvantage, Najin Shield, Alliance, and Cloud Nine are all relatively equal. In Group D, blue side won 11 out of 13 games played (an 85% win rate). If you disregard KaBum as underdogs, blue side wins all 7 games. Another interesting thing to note is that every major upset, bar one, that happened over the course of the group stage happened when the team that was counted out of the running was playing on blue side. AHQ beat EDG on blue side. TSM beat Royal on blue side. SK beat TSM on blue side. TPA beat SK on blue side (this one's a little shaky since SK still wasn't playing with their regular roster at the time, but since TPA only won one game I counted it). KBM beat ALL on blue side. The only upset that didn't happen on blue side was Fnatic beating Samsung Blue. However, Fnatic is a bit of an odd case. If you look at their win rate in groups, they won 0 out of 3 games on blue side and 2 out of 3 games on red side. So, I guess I'll finally get to the point. I know that the whole "Blue-Side" controversy has been around for a while, but I don't necessarily agree with the standard support that's given for it. Most people complain about the mirrored map being chosen over a symmetric one, or the camera perspective. I, however, believe that this disparity (especially in competitive matches) comes from the advantage that having the first pick gives you. For almost every team, having first pick frees you up to target-ban opposing players or ban champions that your team is simply uncomfortable with. Meanwhile, the opposing team is forced to ban whatever they feel are the strongest champions that they absolutely can't let their opponents have, lest they give their opponents an immense advantage. First move advantage has always been a big question in turn-based competitive games. If you look at Chess, White has a 55% win rate at the tournament level. The only reason that this disparity isn't larger is because the person playing Black usually knows that they're at a disadvantage and start from the beginning with the intention of causing a stalemate. In Go, perhaps the most balanced game of all time, there have been professional players that were utterly convinced that having the first move in a match would guarantee them the victory. All of this leaves a few questions to be asked. Firstly, how can we go about balancing champion select to lessen the impact of first move advantage? Secondly, we can see that some teams like Fnatic have an opposite effect on the side win rate. Why is it that these teams seem to experience a similar phenomenon, only in reverse? I don't have the answers to these questions, so the point of making this is to see what other people thought about these two big question marks.
