Strategy saving is over. The International is the place to show your best play. After 48 matches played in the first day of the preliminaries, we can have first look on hero analysis.
The idea of Valve for a 14-match-per-team preliminary round for The International was to give all teams as much time as possible to reach their maximum performance. After day 1 of the preliminaries, all teams have played six matches, making it 48 matches in total. Thanks to the guys from Dota Academy we can have fast look on the picking and banning frequencies. We can analyse how well all 90 available heroes are performing for now.
This is just a selection of possible ways to analyse the data from the preliminary match picks, bans and results.
| Most banned heroes | ||
| # | Hero | Bans (max. 48) |
| 1 |  Naga Siren | 44 |
| 2 |  Dark Seer | 40 |
| 3 |  Lycanthrope | 37 |
| 4 |  Broodmother | 31 |
| 5 |  Nature's Prophet | 27 |
| 6 |  Chen | 26 |
As we see, Naga Siren, one of the last additions to the game, has become top priority in banning for The International 2. This get's even more obvious, if you compare first-ban stats: Naga Siren was 27 times the first ban of any team (Dota Academy counts first ban of first-pick-team and first ban of second-pick-team together as "first ban"). Dark Seer as the second most frequent first ban, was only firstbanned 13 times, followed by Chen with 11 first bans.
| Most picked heroes | ||
| # | Hero | Picks (max. 48) |
| 1 |  Venomancer | 32 |
| 2 |  Leshrac | 26 |
| 2 |  Morphling | 26 |
| 2 |  Rubick | 26 |
| 5 |  Invoker | 25 |
| 6 |  Lone Druid | 24 |
These six heroes were picked in at least half of the games of Sunday in Seattle. Venomancer and Leshrac, as all-rounders do not really surprise, but who would have thought Lone Druid gets actually picked every second game? However, picking alone doesn't win games. A hero is worth nothing, if you lose every time you pick him. So let's have a look at which heroes have the best and the worst win-loss-difference:
| Best/Worst performing heroes | ||||
| # | Hero | Wins | Losses | +/- |
| 1 | Rubick | 17 | 9 | +8 |
| 2 | Lycanthrope | 7 | 1 | +6 |
| 2 |  Bounty Hunter | 9 | 3 | +6 |
| 2 | Morphling | 16 | 10 | +6 |
| 2 | Venomancer | 19 | 13 | +6 |
| # | Hero | Wins | Losses | +/- |
| 52 | Lone Druid | 9 | 15 | -6 |
| 52 |  Shadow Demon | 1 | 7 | -6 |
| 54 | Invoker | 9 | 16 | -7 |
| 54 | Nature's Prophet | 7 | 14 | -7 |
| 56 |  Enigma | 2 | 10 | -8 |
Do you think we will see Invoker, Nature's Prophet and Lone Druid that often in the upcoming two days of The International, after their poor performance of today? Did you expect Bounty Hunter to perform that well? Will we see more Rubick bans tomorrow? Share your opinion on the pick-ban-performance in the comments!
Source: Dota Academy
More information: The International 2012 coverage
