Team Liquid: Mining rich esports data to help players, managers, and teams compete and win
Team Liquid and SAP: A journey of data-driven domination in esports
Esports organization Team Liquid isn’t just a powerhouse in the esports landscape, it is redefining professional esports with data-driven strategies. Through a strategic partnership with SAP, Team Liquid leverages cutting-edge solutions to gain valuable insights from massive datasets. This translates to quicker match preparation, optimized player performance, and a significant competitive edge in the highly dynamic world of professional esports.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Sports and entertainment | Los Angeles, California | >300 employees |
of manual work saved with SAP Business AI.
esports matches stored in SAP HANA Cloud.
of historical game data analyzed.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Sports and entertainment | Los Angeles, California | >300 employees |
of manual work saved with SAP Business AI.
esports matches stored in SAP HANA Cloud.
of historical game data analyzed.
AI draft bot: A competitive advantage enabled by SAP Business AI
Online gaming and competitive esports are incredibly data intensive, and success comes from diving into that data to find incremental improvements. Every move made by teammates and competitors must be analyzed, requiring a holistic view of datasets and anytime, anywhere access to data. In the high-stakes world of League of Legends and Dota 2, every second counts during the crucial draft phase. Traditionally, draft preparation relied on manual analysis by coaches, a time-consuming process that limited Team Liquid’s ability to quickly dissect opponent strategies and formulate optimal picks and bans.
Now, Team Liquid can analyze the draft behavior from more than 6,000 professional esports matches from the past year. The analysis also considers frequent game patches from the publishers, taking an additional 1.6 million amateur matches into account to assess changes in the champions’ power attributes and strengths.
By using the SAP AI Core infrastructure to train a generative AI model that takes data from past matches and puts them into the context of an upcoming game, Team Liquid gets suggestions of the best draft picks and bans to maximize the chances of winning. The solution is built on SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) and the data is stored in SAP HANA Cloud to cope with the 1.6 terabytes of game data from past games. The result is an intelligent draft bot trainer, an application that runs on SAP BTP, visualizes the predictions, and provides Team Liquid with the current winning probability after each pick and ban. Relying on SAP BTP and SAP HANA Cloud, SAP Business AI provides Team Liquid with the opportunity to further improve its game by leveraging data to make more informed decisions.
Co-CEO, Team Liquid
Transforming data into insights: Redefining the esports landscape
Esports organizations generate massive amounts of data from gameplay footage. While valuable, analyzing this data manually is labor intensive and limits the ability to extract actionable insights needed to optimize player performance and develop winning strategies. Team Liquid needed a solution to transform this data overabundance into an arsenal of competitive intelligence.
At the core of this strategy lies SAP HANA Cloud, a powerful in-memory database that facilitates the rapid processing and analysis of massive datasets. This empowers Team Liquid’s analysts to delve into hours of gameplay data, meticulously dissecting player performance, identifying team strengths and weaknesses, and even pinpointing areas where communication breakdowns occur. This granular level of insight equips coaches with the tools to develop individual training strategies and foster a data-driven culture of continuous improvement.
Team Liquid’s commitment to data analytics exemplifies how organizations can leverage technology to gain a strategic advantage. By transforming data into actionable insights, the team is redefining esports and pushing the boundaries of competitive excellence.
Data wins the talent game: Team Liquid’s scouting advantage with SAP solutions
Traditional scouting methods in esports often rely on subjective evaluations and limited data points. In a fiercely competitive scene with countless talented players, identifying the next rising star was a significant challenge for Team Liquid.
That’s why Team Liquid and SAP have co-innovated on a revolutionary scouting system. This innovative approach utilizes a petabyte-scale data lake to ingest and store solo queue match data from top players across the globe. Using the power of SAP HANA Cloud, Team Liquid is now analyzing this vast repository of data in real time. This translates into invaluable insights for player performance, allowing Team Liquid’s scouting staff to identify promising talent based on objective metrics such as in-game decision-making and current form. By harnessing the power of data analytics, Team Liquid gains a significant edge in the race to discover the next generation of esports stars, solidifying its position at the forefront of the industry.
Founder and Co-CEO, Team Liquid
Streamlining operations with SAP Concur: Efficiency wins the game off the field
While Team Liquid dominates the esports scene with its talent, managing a global organization with international travel and complex expense reporting presented a significant challenge. Previous expense solutions lacked support, international scalability, and integration with the ERP system. Upon analyzing its expense processes, it became evident that manual tracking of credit card transactions was inefficient, and a cloud-based solution was necessary.
SAP Concur solutions allow Team Liquid to focus on core competencies like player development and strategic planning, ultimately contributing to their continued success in the highly competitive esports landscape. Team Liquid runs the Concur Expense solution to eliminate manual processes, improve compliance, and ease the burden of receipt management for employees.
“With manual processes, you will always be confronted with compliance challenges,” says Kasper Sanderink, financial and operational manager for Team Liquid. “Using SAP Concur solutions, many compliance challenges are automated away, and we save lots of manual working hours.”