Team SMG vs OB.Neon: Bookmakers have more faith in Neon after the triumph over the Chinese

South-East Asia's first DPC league of the 2021/22 season will continue on Saturday, January 08. Team SMG and OB.Neon will meet in the day's second match in the elite division.

DPC SEA 2021/22 Tour 1: Division I is an online Dota 2 tournament from December 01, 2021, to January 22, 2022. The top eight teams from the SEA region will battle it out for $205,000. On top of the cash prizes, the teams will also fight for three entries to the majors and the crucial DPC points needed to qualify for T11.

It is a tough calendar for Team SMG as they have already played all the formidable teams, leaving them to face the clear-cut elite runners-up in 2022. It's worth realizing that SMG is 2-2 now, and if the team wants to qualify for the majors, they have no margin for error, then a theoretical chance of making it to the Wild Card stage is realistic.

Team SMG's first match in the elite was extremely successful. Destroying Fnatic (2-0) on two maps in less than 30 minutes was a real sensation. Next up was a game against the main red-boss T1 (0-2), but the TI10 participant could not be beaten. Next up was a 2-0 victory over Motivate.Trust Gaming, with the SMG guys picking not exactly reliable drafts, but that didn't stop them from rolling over two MTG maps. The win was followed again by a defeat, this time by BOOM (0-2), who is now playing extremely well, but SMG strained the leader of the SEA elite division.

Team SMG have some stellar Malaysian players at their disposal who could easily strengthen any Southeast Asian Tier-1 team, but in their current stack, they can't get to the result yet. The MidOne and Moon nicknames carry a lot of weight in the region.

Some experts saw this team as possible winners of the Asian qualifiers for the TI. This further underlines the level of stellar characters at some positions. But after failing to qualify for the main tournament of the year, the boys began to play in a large number of low-rated tournaments, sometimes kicking outright horror there and at times even winning such games.

The squad has been playing together for a long time. The only change before the start of the new season's DPC league was the arrival of the only Filipino, Raging Potato, who has experience playing in several TIs and has mainly played for Execration and Neon in the last few years. What awaits the team in this league is difficult to say, as it is their first appearance in the Asian elite, but the team should not become the whipping boys.

Fans of Chinese and Asian Dota 2 will be watching the Huya Winter Invitational in the last week of 2021, which has become a tradition. At this event, OB.Neon not only unexpectedly found themselves in the top 3 of the tournament, but they won the event even though no one had originally placed them among the runners-up and the teams that could surprise them. The Filipinos beat a revamped Team Aster (2-0) and even beat Royal Never Give Up twice (2-1), which is extremely cool. The guys go 0-3 in DPC SEA and are the main contenders for relegation to the second division. This win was an important one for the boys, and the bookmakers had dramatically believed in these guys and changed their odds in their favour, even against SMG, although even before the New Year holidays, there was no doubt in experts' minds that SMG would win here.

The Filipinos started the new DPC cycle with a game against BOOM (0-2). The Neons, one of the favourites, could not play anything against them, although the second map was close. In the second week, they played with Execration (1:2). It was an arch-important game with the aim of survival in the elite division of SEA, but losing the principal match, the opponents sent the team OB.Neon at the bottom of the table, and then was a game with the evil Fnatic... (0:2).

The OB Esports x Neon squad underwent big changes this summer. All the main players moved to BOOM. In the opposite direction, the Asian organization received from the Indonesians only Mikoto, who briefly played for the neons and after the ninth season of BTS moved to Talon Esports. All in all, the new Neons are something of an experiment that should prove itself by the end of this year, or perhaps even the entire first DPC season. But this is just my guess, and so far, the guys participate in every tournament in a row and do not get much glory.

After TI10, this team was one of the first to play in several parallel Tier-3 tournaments, replacing its carry along the way. The current number one is Filipino Palos, who joined the team from Execration. In addition, before the DPC season, OB.Neon added to their ranks an Indonesian two, Mamang Daya, who played for Army Geniuses for a long time. A failed BTS also provoked the lads to change the player at the fifth position, the newcomer being Filipino Abeng, who returns to his home turf after two years.

Yes, the playing form of the lads is definitely in order, the tone they maintain every day. The Filipinos finished the group stage of the ninth BTS season a step away from the top net. They lost the fourth line to Nigma due to a failed face-off that opened this group stage of the tournament for them. That defeat was the only one for the squad, but the new neons can't boast much in the way of wins at BTS either. Army Geniuses and Omega Esports won and drew five more times. And it seems that the December games against Chinese teams inspire optimism, but there are few games left in the region, and also not with the weakest opponents.

I don't particularly believe in the continued triumph of the boys from OB.Neon. Yes, winning the Chinese online tournament is cool, but the Chinese teams didn't even come close to showing the right level of play, using these games as a warm-up before the start of the DPC season. Team SMG had a better December stretch and should continue in the same vein in January. I suggest taking their match win for 1.97.

OB.Neon has proven that they don't feel any authority right now, so it's hard for me to imagine this rink without three maps, and a Total Over 2.5 maps bet is available for 2.00.

Fans of risk and big odds, you can catch 3.50 on the correct score of the meeting 2:1 in favour of SMG.