Rough start for Team Secret in Dota Pro Circuit 2023

Dota Pro Circuit 2023 has begun and Team Secret are unrecognizable. It seems that the departure of Michal “Nisha” Jankowski has had a massive impact on their strength and it will probably take at least several months to fix the situation.

Secret finished second at The International 2022, so there’s no excuse for them to lose the first two matches of WEU’s Division I. The only explanation is that the new player, Miroslav “BOOM” Bican, has not yet found a way to synergize with the rest of the team.

What went wrong against Team Liquid

The first match played by Team Secret in the new Dota 2 season was against Team Liquid. This is the team that bought Nisha from Secret at the end of last year and practically stole Clement “Puppey” Ivanov’s best player.

Knowing all his strategies, Nisha was able to teach his new teammates how Secret operate and the match was over very quickly.

Game one lasted 28 minutes while game 2 lasted 36. In both cases, Secret tried to abuse the Razor plus Treant combination that many people used in pubs. Razor is the most successful hero in Dota 2 right now, so why not pick it in such an important match?

But Puppey didn’t realize that he was baited into picking this hero. Liquid didn’t touch it at all during the drafts and looked ready to answer with perfect picks. In both games, they took Clockwerk and Rubick, two heroes whose natural abilities ruin Razor’s game.

They also took cores that can easily do their thing against Razor without having to adjust too much. One was Morphling and another was Sniper. The games looked easy for Liquid and the main issue here was Secret’s drafts.

What went wrong against OG

In the second match, OG picked two very annoying combinations of heroes and simply erased Secret’s heroes from the map. In the first match, Puppey thought that it would be a good idea to pick Techies. But his strategy didn’t go as planned and OG took control of the map relatively quickly.

The game was even for the first 20 minutes, at least in networth. But OG were better positioned in every way for the mid game.

In the second game, Puppey tried an Alchemist strategy and practically lost the game in 15 minutes. This fight was a complete disaster. Alc had to play 1v5 the entire game and in the end, after just 30 minutes, OG won.

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