sikle compared the win rates of the Forces of Light and the Forces of Darkness at the 2026 Esports World Cup in Dota 2

Team Spirit analyst Mark “sikle” Lerman shared statistics on the win rates of the Forces of Light and Darkness at the 2026 Dota 2 Esports World Cup on his personal Telegram channel.
The quote is reproduced with the source’s spelling and punctuation intact
This is the first tournament since PGL Wallachia Season 7 where Dire has been leading as a side.
It’s purely random and doesn’t mean anything yet. For example, very often one team wins the coin toss and chooses the peak stage, while the other is left to choose a side—it picks a random one and either loses or wins. There are many factors.
We need to look at the dynamics toward the end of the year and also take into account the map changes introduced by patches, because in every patch where the Tormentor was tweaked in some way, that side took the lead. That’s actually why Radiant started experiencing wild fluctuations, especially when teams focused directly on this.
By the way, in 2026, the win rates for both sides were exactly 50/50, while in 2025, Radiant led by only 0.19%.
Earlier, Mark “sikle” Lerman reported on Telegram that Valve had fixed a bug in Dota 2 that allowed for infinite health regeneration when switching to Power Treads while under the Granite Aura from the Ancient Granite Golem.
Photo by Mark “sikle” Lerman.


