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The International, Valve's yearly Dota 2 championship series, will be running its main event for 2015 all of next week. Many of us are excited to watch, but there's one small challenge: Several Polygon editors love watching Dota 2 but don't play a ton of it and don't know the best ways to watch this incredibly complex game.
To help out, we've called upon our resident Dota 2 expert and our resident watching-esports-but-not-really-understanding-them expert and put them together on a video. We watch a game together and try to determine when and where to pay attention, what stats are the most important to track, how to know which team is winning and when a game is nearing its conclusion and more.
(Correction to the video's commentary: Competitive Dota 2 occurs in Captain's Mode, not Captain's Draft. That's a slightly different mode!)
