All About Ant

Name: Vahid Anthony "Ant" Moh Heng Li
Started competitive gaming in: End of 2005
Favourite gaming hardware: Razer mice

Ant (middle) with Team Zenith on their Euro tour in 2007

Tournaments won/ranked in:

Rapture Gaming Season 2 (Nov 2005) – Champion
E-Games $10,000 DOTA Tournament (Dec 2005) – Champion
E2Max Overnight New Year DOTA Tournament (Dec 2005/Jan 2006) – Champion
SengKang CC Tournament @ E2Max (Mar 2006) – Champion
ESWC Singapore qualifiers @ Asteroids (Apr 2006) – Champion
WCG Singapore qualifiers @ Lanlab Online (May 2006) – Champion
CAPL Spring Season (May 2006) – Champion
ESWC Singapore finals (May 2006) – Champion
WGT qualifiers @ Ngee Ahn Poly (July 2006) - Champion
GXL Season 1 (July 2006) - Champion
CAPL Summer Season (August 2006) - Champion
Asian WCG (August 2006) - 2nd Runner-Up
CPL Singapore DOTA Event (September 2006) - Champion
TKA World DOTA tournament (October 2006) - 2nd Runner-Up
Zion.Net Malaysia Call Of The Wardrum Challenge (October 2006) - Champion
CAPL Autumn Season (November 2006) - Champion
GXL Season 2 (December 2006) - Champion
RGN Season 3 (December 2006) - Champion
Intel Gaming Cup (May 2007) - Champion
CAPL Spring Season (June 2007) - Champion
Batu Pahat Resurgence Tournament (July 2007) - 1st Runner-Up
CAPL Summer Season (July 2007) - Champion
WCG Singapore (August 2007) - 1st Runner-Up
CAPL Spring Season (September 2007) - 3rd Runner-Up
WGT Singapore (October 2007) - Champion
ADC Singapore Qualifiers (October 2007) – Champion
DOTASG 1v1 Competition (2005) – 3 time Champion
WCG Qualifiers Home Team (June 2008) - 3rd
WCG Qualifiers Safra (July 2008)  - 1st
WCG Open 2008 (August 2008)  - 2nd
WGT 2008 (September 2008) - 2nd
CAPL Winter 2008 (September 2008) - 3rd
Gaming Giants Katong Competition (September 2008) - 1st
CAPL Winter 2009 (July 2009) - 1st
2nd EVO Lan Competition (August 2009) - 2nd
DOTASG Summerfury (August 2009) - 1st
ESTC Winter (October 2009) - 1st
DOTASG AutumnFlux (October 2009) - 1st
HomeLAN Katong Competition (January 2010) - 2nd

Ant's Team Zenith publicity poster

I know you didn't read through all of that. It just inflates my ego to make my list long as big as possible, when it really isn't that great.

Then again, it's pretty impressive. Eh?

For those who don't know me, I'm Ant. I wrote almost all of the Singaporean interviews on this site so far. Today, I write about myself, and so all censors and restrictions that have come from my fear of offending my subject matter have been cast aside.

I shall begin with a brief introduction of the first half of my DotA career. To begin with, I should say that it helped a lot to know the right people. GPS, whose short article about himself can be found here was a schoolmate of mine, and while I didn't take part in any LAN tournaments for most of 2005, I played much with his team and was accepted into team mVp at the end of 2005, and the rest can be found in his article. Unlike him, I'm still playing DotA till this day, though the scene is admittedly not as hot, and the first half of my DotA career is greatly differentiated from the next half, separated by the common but significant event known as E-Day.

Enlistment day.

Most of the first half of my DotA career can be found covered in very great detail here, and then here for a while. It pains me to do a one paragraph summary when I have covered almost every single DotA experience in walls of text at those two sites. So there, that's 2 of my glorious years as a Singaporean DotA player.

Pretty cheap though. All I did was link you to my previous work.

Let's talk about E-day. Or rather, let me type about the day I was enlisted into the army. I was playing a DotaSG competition, and I had 5 missed calls from when I was playing (I don't pick up my phone when playing, and I don't have any Caller ID). On 2pm that fateful Wednesday, my phone rang again and I picked it up.

“Hello, is this Anthony Moh?”
“Ya”
“Do you know that you're enlisting this Friday?”
“WHAT?!”

I should point out that my enlistment experience is a gross exception. Few others get such short notice. Anyway, so on Friday morning I was off to an offshore island for Basic Military Training. Let me explain the impact of this on my gaming career.

Just gaming. I'm pretty sure you can ask every other Singaporean guy about their National Service. In fact, this short paragraph is just for the uninitiated who don't know how NS will affect them.

Most guys will spend the first 2 months or more (I spent 3) of their NS life stuck in an offshore island, to enjoy life outside on certain short weekends only. Unless you can walk on water, you won't be seeing many computers during this time. There's rarely a question of whether you will stay in your current gaming team when you enlist. It hardly is possible to be an active competitive gamer when you can only spend one day a week with a computer, and even those days are not guaranteed.

Well, even while I spent most of my time stuck on an offshore island, I did play a few games for Zenith while they were struggling to find their last, but those were small competitions on weekends, and I never actually played with them at all on any other times.

Life after the offshore island is when I was lucky enough to be able to play a bit more DotA. If you're wondering whether you'll still be able to play games when in NS, I can't tell you. No one can. Everyone's fate in NS is completely different, the amount of time you have is completely different from person to person. I was lucky enough to have enough time. At least, I had longer weekends once I wasn't stuck in an offshore island, and for my 2nd year, I was lucky enough to be given enough freedom to never have to worry about having time to go for competitions.

Many people in NS will be luckier than me, but many others also won't.

The inability to play on weekdays was a pretty major factor in being part of a team. The more serious teams had insane training schedules before major competitions, which I could never follow.

At this point, my story cannot be complete without me illustrating how lucky I had gotten knowing the right people. My presence in the most successful Singaporean DotA team for the first 2 years of version 6, for the first half of my DotA career, can solely be attributed to the fact that I was friends with GPS. There was pretty much no chance at all that I would be part of that team had I not known GPS prior to gaming.

The successes in the next half of my DotA career, I also attribute to being immensely fortunate in knowing the right people. Having been teammates with ice and LuX for 2 years in Zenith, I was able to find a spot for myself in their team around the middle of 2008, my first year in Army. Together with Alanter and WaN, I managed to win myself many competitions. We then, ice, LuX, WaN, Alanter, and myself, were XtC.DotA, ruling the Singaporean DotA scene for a short period of time, following the disbanding of Zenith.

Then came SMM 2008, a DotA tournament of an immense scale. XtC won without me, and then disbanded with no thought as to the fate of its former members. For 6 months in 2009, I no longer had the luck of knowing the right people.

CAPL 2009 Singapore in July, held right with WCG 2009 as well. All of a sudden, ice wants to play. LuX has no team. WaN as well. Hooray! An opportunity!

My gallivanting around teams in Singapore for the first 6 months of 2009 led me to team up with d4rkw1sh, arguably the best supporter ever in DotA. Suddenly, the team of ice, WaN, LuX, and me, formed to play CAPL, barely 3 days before the competition. But we didn't have a last player. And so d4rkw1sh came into the picture to fill the empty slot. Team ICE PRO, with no training together, won CAPL 2009, emerging victorious over Malaysian and Singaporean giants like Cybertime and the two Kingsurf divisions. Using lineups of 5 heroes that had been pre-planned, all to suit our players' strengths, we achieved victory over experienced teams with no team training.

The next few months saw me with good results in a few small competitions, with roughly the same team, except without ice. Then came ESTC, another huge competition, which I was fortunate enough to participate in, having been pulled in to XtC once again. We won. We went on to win a few more competitions in Singapore after that. And then SMM 2009 came along, and the exact same thing that happened to me in 2008 happened again.

I've had 2 years of being part of a constant team prior to enlistment, and after enlistment, I've had 2 years of being part of many different teams with different success rates. As I ORD next week, I enter yet another phase of my DotA career... perhaps the final one where it all ends.

I wanted to stop when I had major exams coming up, much like GPS, but I found myself with time between my enlistment and graduation from school, so I continued playing DotA.

I wanted to stop when I enlisted, but then I found certain benefits of being in NS. For one, while I was unable to play on weekdays, I had absolutely nothing stopping me from playing as much as I liked when I was at home. There was no homework, no studying, nothing at all that I was “supposed” to be doing. So I kept playing.

I'm entering University... should I still be playing?

Let me not end on this note, and provide a few fun facts about my DotA career, which, while you can find out from reading the entire of the from-a-to-z- blog, you might not have realised.

Kingsurf and me. I make this statement because every single game I win against Kingsurf has been pretty epic. The first was back in 2007, Zenith went down to Malaysia and played a 100 minute game against the newly formed Kingsurf, possibly the most emotionally roller-coasty match that I have ever played. I played Skeleton King, and we won a game that seemed to be going too much in Kingsurf's way.

The second was back in 2008 with XtC in WGT 2008, I played POTM and fought another long match against KS, and won. The third, In 2009, in CAPL, with ICE PRO, was when I fought one of the most intense matches in my life against KS, playing Visage. The final one, in ESTC shortly after, that I played in (and won)m was perhaps the most relaxing game of my life against KS. I was playing the Crystal Maiden, and carried virtually no burden of controlling the game.

The next interesting fact (that some of you might have called me out for) is that I can only play a few heroes. At each point of time when I was doing well in DotA, I was playing a different hero - often one that no one else was using (which ensured that I could get it) - and doing very well at that. Back in 2006, my team wasn't picking Lich because it was a good hero. We were picking Lich because I could use it, and nothing else. Back in CAPL, if some team had the urge to ban POTM, TS, and Visage, I would suddenly have no hero to play at that level of DotA at that time.

The last, and perhaps least known fact, is that I have always believed that OM (only mid) is the most fun mode in DotA, and that it's a pity that people won't play it.