All in a Day's Work for Zai
A legend steps back from the game.
After The International 2023, zai announced he’ll be taking an indefinite leave from Dota. Playing Dota at a high level can take it’s toll with the constant travel, bootcamps, and high stress environments. Zai isn’t that old - he turned 26 a few months ago, just 2 years above the average TI2023 player’s age. Whilst it’s not totally unexpected to see him go, it’s still sad to see him hang up the hat.
He’ll retire with so many excellent statistics and milestones, but the one that always evaded him was a TI win; and for many that missing part of his legacy will always (unfairly, I believe) keep him excluded from some people’s list of Dota 2 greats. He came very close — with four 3rd place finishes and a 4th - only a handful of players are ahead of him in this metric.
With 2117 pro games under his belt, he’s played the 15th most games of any player. 370 players have 500+ career games and of those zai is #1, with 66.6% winrate. He’s ahead of his former captain Puppey, as well as some of the two-time TI champions: Collapse and Mira. He’s ahead of them all by a significant margin given the number of games (1.71% over Puppey, 2.29%+ over the rest).
This quality extends to LAN records as well — he’s one of 5 players to have over 1000 games on LAN, and a 63.0% winrate to boot (4th highest of the players with 500+). In terms of teams, he’s played most of his career between 4 teams: Team Secret (721 games), Evil Geniuses (550), Team Liquid (459), and Optic Gaming (306). His record on Secret is the most impressive, a 525-196 record (72.82% winrate), the highest of any player-team record with 500+ games.
In terms of roster-based records, his time with MATUMBAMAN, Puppey, YapzOr, and Nisha was the 2nd most successful 5-man squad in terms of winrate (240-92, 72.29%) in all games (LAN + online). Of the 100 most experienced 5-man squads on LAN only, zai appears in 4 of the top 7 rosters (including the #1 spot).
The teammates he’s played with over the years include many of the greats in NA/WEU, as well as currently excellent players which have risen up alongside him.
Of his 25 biggest rivalries, he has a positive win-loss against all of them except RAMZES (which Zai is 40-41 against). Casting the net wider to his 50 biggest rivals, only Rodjer (27-34 for Zai) and Quinn (25-26 for Zai) are ahead in their matchups.
Although he’s played primarily as an offlaner (and with some seasons as a position 4), Zai has always been regarded as one of the most versatile players of all time - featuring a wide hero pool and variety of innovative builds and playstyles no matter where he’s playing. Despite only the two roles he’s played, he’s had games on 105 different heroes - the 12th most of all players (the ones he hasn’t played are Oracle, Grimstroke, and a smorgasbord of carries). On LAN only 4 players have played more unique heroes.
He’s played the 2nd most games on Enigma (93) and Necrophos (30), and the 3rd most games on Pangolier (59). When Pangolier was first added to Captain’s Mode him and iceiceice were fondly competing to be regarded as the best on the hero - finding new tricks, tactics, and sneaky behaviour to outplay their enemies.
One of his funnier stats come from his game for OpTiC against Let’s Do It at The Summit 9. He went 1/19/17 on Pudge, one of the highest number of deaths any player has had in a LAN game ever (24th highest: just some 20s, 21s, and a single 22 death game ahead of him). Hilariously, if he didn’t get that single kill he would be the tied closest player ever to the Maelk Award (who had 0 kills and 20 deaths in a winning game), obviously with syndereN.
Thank you, zai.
