Building a Real-Time Dota 2 Draft Prediction System with Machine Learning
python
dev.to
I built an AI system that watches live Dota 2 pro matches and predicts which team will win based purely on the draft. Here's how it works under the hood. The Problem Dota 2 has 127 heroes. A Captain's Mode draft produces roughly 10^15 possible combinations. Analysts spend years building intuition about which drafts work — I wanted to see if a model could learn those patterns from data. Architecture Live Match → Draft Detection → Feature Engineering → XGBoost + DraftNet → Prediction + SHAP Exp