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Meet the 3K MMR analyst behind Dota’s Ad Finem
How Allen ‘Bonkers’ Cook helped an underdog team reach the finals of the Boston Major.
This isn’t the sort of insight you’d expect from the analyst of a team that won half a million dollars last month playing Dota 2. But as we find out, Allen ‘Bonkers’ Cook, a man little known in the burgeoning world of eSports, is not your usual strategist.
“I am genuinely awful,” the analyst jests, with his tongue only halfway in his cheek, whilst we discuss the stigma surrounding the opinion of those floating around the middle to lower echelons of Valve’s matchmaking. “I play around 3,200 MMR. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if 95 percent of the community thought they could do a better job than me. They might even be right – but they need to prove it.”
“People probably look at Ad Finem and think that the guys are putting on some sort of act. They’re not. I can tell you now that after a scrim or even as food arrives there’s some sort of weird party. Spartan will be standing up and singing a song that I’ve never heard before,” admits Allen, sounding drained at the very thought of going through it again, as doubtless he will. We spoke to Allen extensively about just how he’s ended up where he is now, as well as Ad Finem’s experience at the Boston Major.
How on earth did you end up as an analyst in Dota 2?
Now that’s a very good question. I’ve played Dota since 2013 – and I continue to struggle to describe what I do to any of my real life friends. “Allen, what’s it all about? Is it just a fighting game?” is a question I tend to get asked. To call it a fighting game is tenuous at very best. I try and describe it as a mixture of chess and fighting but even then it’s doing the game a wild injustice. If anyone has a suggestion of how to explain what Dota is to their friends, I’d love to know how.
As we touched on, the community like to place extra emphasis on MMR as a major factor when it comes to gameplay opinion. What are your thoughts?
I would say I’m probably ten years older than your average player. Dota tends to pull in people who have an interest in statistics due to the sheer amount of discussion in the game. There’s so much that one person will think is fundamentally right and others will say it’s completely the opposite which is what intrigued me in the first place. People may tell you you’re a plonker for building a hero a certain way – but I’m all about the support Morphling. I see Ad Finem picking Jakiro mid and at times I question things, but at the end of the day Spartan knows what he’s doing. He’s an eye-opener when it comes to the draft.
When it comes down to it, I’m 37. I would have retired from Dota 10 to 13 years ago should I have ever had the ability to play at the top. There’s a reason that players retire at the age they tend to. It’s not because they’re stupid or have forgotten how the game works, it’s because, simply put, your mechanical skill wanes as you get older. I can’t run as fast as I could ten years ago and the same goes for pressing buttons. For instance, I’ll play a hero and I know the best build is a Veil, Hex and having a Blink Dagger. I look at myself and think I should be building an Armlet, and I know how the item works. In the heat of a fight I just can’t use it like the pros so I will just skip it and play to my advantages.
If the hero needs a Veil of Discord and a Hex, I’ll consider getting one maybe skipping the other as too many active items make life difficult for an old man like me. You just have to be true to yourself. It may sound like a churlish thing and people might not believe it but just wait for ten years from now and you’ll all be playing Wraith King carry because he has one button; happy days. I would describe myself as a high MMR thinker but a low MMR player.
So what does your role with Ad Finem entail?
I think a point that I would like to emphasise is that every analyst takes a different view on what should be done. I very much consider my role for Ad Finem as more of a scouting role. I don’t look at all to analyse my team, or tell them what they did wrong. It’s too negative a way of looking at it and all of the Ad Finem boys will pore over every single small detail of their own game. I look for patterns within opponent’s play. I find patterns with regards to their warding, smoke ganks, drafting and general facts. I only tend to delve in facts; I don’t like to give suggestions. You will never find me saying “I think they will pick this and you should counter it with this.” I can make that suggestion but I don’t think it’s worth doing. The team knows what they want to do, and if I can tell them that there’s a good chance that the opponent is going to pick X hero in the first drafting phase and Y hero in the second phase they can then use that information however they wish.
The automated side of things has been developed by a good friend of mine, Matthew Chadwick. He has a PhD in Particle Physics and previously worked on the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. He’s now helping me do Dota statistics and analysis. How about that for a career change? The work he’s done is invaluable and I wouldn’t be able to do it without his help.
What do you produce and give to the team in terms of tangible work? How long does it take you on a match-by-match basis?
The Ad Finem boys have been incredible since I entered the fray. They’re incredibly welcoming with my work and they will tell me when something’s terrible, and they’ll ask me for other things. For any match, be it best-of-one or best-of-three, I prepare a document which is probably 14 pages on average. At Boston I would sit down with the team and Spartan would tell me what information he wanted, and I would remove aspects for his information pack. As a leader you can only take on so much information but I always prepare everything as different players take different things. Our offlaner, SkyLark, may want to know if they lane ward and when they tend to rotate. I will also tell him the likelihood that they will push his tower should he retreat to jungle. ThuG, our mid laner, doesn’t care about that information but he will care about the timings their supports tend to rotate and which angles they prefer. Each aspect of the document is relevant to different players. Each report tends to take me three hours if I am uninterrupted.
How did the role change at a LAN? The games come thick and fast and your opponent is often unknown. Did that add an extra challenge?
It definitely did and I learned a lot from our experience in Boston. The best example of the challenge was probably the final. We played Digital Chaos in the semi-finals so I had a full pack prepared for them and then almost had to take a punt on which team to prepare for in the finals. The issue is that at the Major you only get five computers in the practice room. It’s understandable as we only have five players but for an analyst like myself, a laptop doesn’t do the job that I need it to do. I found myself going to bed about five hours before the players and then waking up at a normal hour to have three hours on the PC before the players emerged from bed.
The players like to have a wind-down on their PCs and no matter how many times they tell you that they don’t read Reddit, you shouldn’t believe a word they say.
After the semi-finals we got back, had some food and tried to wind down as the adrenaline was still flowing. The players like to have a wind-down on their PCs and no matter how many times they tell you that they don’t read Reddit, you shouldn’t believe a word they say. All of the boys were back checking Reddit and loving the hype around them. They were checking out all of the videos, the memes – you name it. My favourite was the “Nice courier you’ve got there, shame it died thrice” with reference to MNT’s courier sniping and the boys absolutely loved that. I actually had to ask Spartan if I could use his PC to prepare. I had to take a punt on OG or EG for more detailed prep and for some reason I chose EG despite backing OG to win the tournament before the event.
I have to concede that I probably made a mistake by watching our semi-final against DC at the venue rather than using that time to prepare adequately for both eventualities. I would like to think I wouldn’t make that mistake again, though.
We need to talk a little bit more about Ad Finem. Like we’ve previously said, they are incredibly energetic and seemingly a bit mad. What has it been like working with them?
The guys are ripping each other to shreds, all of the time. It’s loud, it’s crazy and they are just like that around the clock. I don’t know how they maintain that level of energy. I have three young kids of my own. I can give them an iPad or something and it’ll calm them down and they’ll be quiet. You give these guys anything – even a pencil to play with and ThuG will be bouncing off the walls about it. They’re incredible guys.
One of my favourite stories was from the Grand Final. Between each game I went and spoke to the team and after losing in Game One of the final, Spartan emerges from the booth in absolute hysterics. I asked him what that was all about and he talked about the draft. We picked a draft which we had practiced in a scrim where we planned on last picking Nature’s Prophet. Now Furion hadn’t been picked at all in the Main Event, and equally had not been banned. The hero was considered garbage but we had a Drow strat that we liked to pick Furion as a surprise last pick. Out of nowhere, OG banned the Prophet and we went on to lose convincingly. Spartan comes straight up to me and just says “the one time we used it in a scrim was against OG.” We were annihilated courtesy of a draft that Tal ‘Fly’ Aizik remembered we played but we couldn’t remember playing against them.
Equally, after the ridiculous Game Three I was sitting next to the coach and manager and we had seen that Madara had picked up a Demon’s Edge and I turned round to the coach and he said “there’s no chance he goes for a Rapier.” Two minutes later and he’s picked up a Divine and I found it incredibly harrowing to even watch. I found it terrifying that he was walking around with it and I wasn’t even playing in the game. At the end I asked Madara if he discussed it with his team. His response was “No, I just bought it.” Spartan mentioned that he also had no idea that Madara was going to buy it until he saw it flash up. They just trust each other. I personally would have thought that may have been a discussion as a team.
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