Chapter 12. The Card Game of a Life: 820, Zou Yitian

A chapter from ONE MORE WAY: The History Behind Chinese Esports, by BBKinG (Liu Yang). Translated from the Chinese original: 十二 820的人生牌局

First published in the author's Zhihu column on November 28, 2013: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/19625947

This translation was reviewed against the Chinese original on August 1, 2026. If you spot a mistranslation, a wrong name, or a factual error, please open an issue or send a pull request.

Life is like a card game. You do not get to decide which cards you are dealt, but whether you can win with the hand in front of you depends on how well you play.

On September 8, 2011, the player known as Boss 8, or 820, formally announced his retirement. He had won six world championships and close to thirty major titles, and he left at the height of his reputation, bringing his career as a professional Dota player to a fitting close.

When 820, tall and thin, sat down in front of me, he said the timing of the interview was very good. He used to be guarded about the past, he told me, but he had now let all of it go. Anything could be discussed. Ask away.

Over the next five hours I heard an esports story about climbing up from the very bottom of society.

On April 13, 1989, 820's card game began.

820, whose real name is Zou Yitian, was born in Qingpu District, Shanghai. His parents divorced when he was six or seven and he grew up with his mother in a single-parent household. Money was tight at home, but his paternal grandparents lived nearby and helped look after him, which is why he was able to have a carefree childhood.

820's mother held very conservative views. In her mind, his future was school, then more study, then a steady job that came with si jin, the Shanghai term for the pension, medical and unemployment insurance contributions plus the housing fund, and then marriage, children and an ordinary life. For a while 820 seemed to be following exactly that track. As a child he was introverted, shy of strangers, unsure of himself and quick to give way. He never got into arguments with anyone and had no great ambitions. He was an ordinary boy with ordinary marks at school. After middle school he went straight to a technical school to study electromechanical engineering. His family had no money, no connections and no background, and 820 felt his prospects were completely dark.

Compared with most people, the hand 820 had been dealt was clearly a poor one. Looking back now, without that one small and then rather unremarkable card called esports, he might really have lived his whole life in obscurity.

Finding his way into games

Naturally, 820 had plenty of contact with games from an early age. The Famicom at a friend's house, Nekketsu High School, Sanguo Qunyingzhuan and StarCraft: he played all of them. After the Reign of Chaos version of Warcraft III appeared in 2003 he tried the competitive mode, decided it was far too difficult, and turned instead to Warcraft III RPG maps, a more casual way of playing.

There were a great many Warcraft III RPG maps online at the time, and 820 kept switching from one to the next. Eventually he found one he enjoyed, Fujia Tianxia, a game rather like Monopoly in which you rolled dice and played moves. Its controls, however, were so complicated that in the end even his own group gave it up. Zhen San Guo Wu Shuang, a map made in Taiwan, was taking off on the mainland at exactly that moment, so 820 and several of his Fujia Tianxia friends moved across to it because it demanded far more mechanical skill.

Version 3.7 of Zhen San Guo Wu Shuang

It was version 3.7 of Zhen San Guo Wu Shuang, as it happens, that produced a great many of today's top Dota stars. Why say that?

Because heroes in that version had very low attack damage, which made last-hitting extremely hard, and only very precise mechanics could build an early advantage. Nobody could have guessed that a stretch of play begun with no such intention would give that generation of Zhen San Guo Wu Shuang players such solid mechanical foundations. When they later moved to Dota and discovered that Dota heroes hit so much harder that last-hitting was easy, they were immediately in their element. That is why so many top professional Dota players came out of that first wave.

Why Zou Yitian is called 820

The people playing Zhen San Guo Wu Shuang around 2005 were a very small group compared with the other esports titles of the same period. The scene was tiny. Most of them played on the Haofang platform and gathered on the U9 forum. It was there that 820 got to know LongDD, a hot-tempered and thoroughly easy-going character, and the two became friends. LongDD was already very well known in the Zhen San Guo Wu Shuang scene as a leading member of the famous Numbers team, whose players took numbers as their names. The original Numbers first team had only five to ten players. The good-natured 357 was the captain, and the better known members included Shanghai Ma Chao (257), LongDD (520) and 286, with 820 joining later. That is where his name came from. As an aside, 820 sounds like the words for "I do not love you" in Chinese, although Boss 8 says he picked it at random.

There were few tournaments in the Zhen San Guo Wu Shuang years and almost no prize money. Nobody had any concept of esports. They were simply playing a game. Dota versions only began to settle down once 6.27 arrived. The versions before it were full of bugs, so it was from 6.27 onwards that Dota slowly came to be accepted more widely.

820 switched over during Dota 6.27, the first player in the Zhen San Guo Wu Shuang Numbers team to make the move.

At the start, the Dota channel on the Haofang platform held only a hundred or so people. The atmosphere around the game was good, and every day you would run into the GL team's Huiyao, Chenlun, Xiaoxiongmao, Wanbaolu, Ni and the rest. Gradually people began to notice a young player called 820 who was very good indeed. Joining GL followed naturally from that.

In 2006, the first Dota tournament run by U9 drew more than ten teams.

GL entered two teams, alongside Mage, ifnt and others. In the end GL's second team, 820 with his teammates Ni, Dashu and 403, took the title. The prize money was very small, but they were delighted with it. From then on 820 and Ni were known as GL's Twin Stars. Ni, incidentally, never went on to a professional Dota career. He took the path 820 himself had nearly taken, going out to work and living the life of an ordinary person. It is a little regrettable, but everyone makes their own choices in life.

After that first U9 Dota tournament, LongDD joined GL's second team on 820's recommendation, and Snoy, from HTML, another strong team, joined GL as well. Without anyone quite noticing, GL2 had become the best Dota team in China, even though Dota itself was still developing slowly inside a very small circle.

CPL Chengdu, 2006.

This was the earliest offline Dota tournament held in China and it brought together the first generation of the Chinese Dota scene. 820 says something quite theatrical happened there. During the qualifying stage he and Ni had played as ringers for the Hust team and carried it into the final, making Hust one of the four teams to reach the offline event. Then, in the final, the GL team they actually played for was beaten by Hust. 820 and Ni did not know whether to laugh or cry.

The early Chinese Dota scene was very immature and a number of its habits were bad.

Something should be said here about the practice of playing as a ringer for another team. It was extremely common at the time and an open secret. Everyone knew it was wrong and everyone had grown used to it. Years later that bad habit became the fuse for a major incident, one that destroyed EHOME at its peak and left the whole Dota scene badly shaken.

To return to the story: CPL Chengdu in 2006 was the first time 820 had travelled far from home. He spent more than thirty hours on a train to get to the tournament and met many Dota comrades he knew well but had never seen in person. For a boy of fifteen at the time, that was a very happy occasion. In the tournament itself, unfortunately, the two GL squads ended up facing each other in the third-place match.

Afterwards GL merged its two squads. LongDD and DC moved into GL's first team, and after repeated adjustments over the following year the roster settled into the one that won the Beijing regional final at WCG:

820, Ni, DC, LongDD and Snoy

GL's later ACG title in Singapore is covered in the DC chapter of this history, which you can read there. Here I will set down 820's memories of that tournament.

His family were still against him playing games at the time, so for his first trip abroad he arranged his travel documents without telling them. He took nothing with him, not even a bag, and went to Singapore in the clothes he was wearing. The organisers gave each player 20 Singapore dollars a day for food, and he would spend six of it on prawn noodles, which he thought were delicious.

What stayed with 820 about the tournament was that changing key bindings was not allowed in Singapore, and that the format took 16 teams through a group stage on points into a top eight, after which it was single elimination. Typing GG did not count as a concession either. Much of this differed from the rules at home, but perhaps because Southeast Asian Dota was played in a more casual spirit while the Chinese scene was steadier and more determined to win, with a wider range of strategies than the Southeast Asian teams had, GL took the title comfortably.

That also gave 820 the first real money of his life, 8,000 yuan. It was the largest prize money in professional competition at the time, and for 820 it was a considerable sum.

The break-up of GL

Back in China, GL's attempt to turn professional stalled, while their old rivals HTML found a sponsor first and wanted 820 to play professionally for them. 820 had no other options in life at that point. The talent he was showing in esports was the one shaft of light at the bottom of a pitch dark valley, and all he could do was follow it. GL broke up as a result, and 820 felt guilty about that for a long time, but making choices is part of a hard life.

At the end of 2007, two months after coming home from Singapore, 820 joined HTML for 1,500 yuan a month, training online. That was the beginning of his professional Dota career.

Before long, though, he felt he would never fit into that team.

As it happened, fashao, an esports figure who had come back from studying abroad, was building the professional team CaNt. Because the team trained offline in Shanghai, which was better for raising the level of play, 820, who lived in Shanghai himself, thought it over carefully and decided to join. fashao offered him 2,500 yuan a month, very high pay for the Dota scene of the day.

The roster then was: 820, 357, Yang Jiajia (YJJ), McGroSs and Fangsi

Everything seemed to be moving in a good direction, and 820 finally began to feel some hope about his future.

CaNt adrift

At first CaNt had real momentum, with clear improvements in both training standards and results. Two months later, however, inexplicable management problems appeared at the company. Salaries began to fall behind, although they were all paid in the end, and the team's training fell apart. Everyone was playing DNF. They then lost a run of matches to EHOME, where his old teammates DC, LongDD and Snoy were playing, and beat EHOME only once, at ChinaJoy, to take the CIG title run by Haofang. 820 decided that this could not go on and that he needed a change of environment.

The formidable Brother 7, EHOME's team manager 71

At that point 71, EHOME's team manager, came to Shanghai to talk to 820 face to face. Note that he went straight to CaNt's training base to do it. He wanted 820 at EHOME. 820 asked whether he could bring 357 with him. As it happened, 2009 had just retired and EHOME had let LongDD go over problems with his temperament, which left two places open, so 820 and 357 joined EHOME and formed the golden roster that everyone agreed was unbeatable in 2008:

820, 357, DC, GK and Snoy

Yet it was precisely because of that widely shared arrogance that the players went into battle without settling in together properly. The newly formed EHOME immediately suffered a heavy defeat, knocked out in the first round of MGC by Fnatic. At that tournament EHOME also ran into CaNt, now led by LongDD, and LongDD took his revenge, going 16 kills and no deaths on Queen of Pain to knock some sense into EHOME.

Once awake to it, EHOME reined in their conceit and began training ferociously in preparation for SMM in Southeast Asia. Once this team took something seriously its quality came out, and it won the title in Southeast Asia without much trouble.

After SMM several EHOME players retired. As the DC chapter also explains, low salaries and the club taking a large share of the prize money were the main reasons they left.

820, though, felt that he was young and could still win more and prove himself, so he stayed and waited for a new EHOME to be put together.

Infighting at EHOME

The new EHOME appeared in 2009:

820, 357, Daidai, Fangsi and Shanghai Ma Chao

That line-up was not ideal and the players kept swapping positions among themselves. After losing the WCG qualifier the roster was adjusted again, to:

DGC, GK, 820, 357 and Daidai

From there they could not be stopped, winning WCG, EOG and the G League one after another.

In 2009, before the WCG China competition, a power struggle broke out inside EHOME's management, mainly between 71 and He Qiu, the first executive editor-in-chief of Electronic Sports magazine, mentioned in the previous chapter. He Qiu wanted control of the EHOME team and used the club's staff upheaval and poor results in that period as his lever. Pushed into a corner by the senior management, 71 hardened and gave a pledge: if the team did not win WCG, he would go.

That year's WCG was truly brutal. EHOME were unexpectedly eliminated in the qualifier, changed the roster at the last minute, fought their way back through the repechage and finally won the WCG title. The result of the power struggle was that 71 stayed and He Qiu left.

You can see from this how combative 71 was and how much he hated to lose. That character was also the main cause of what I am about to describe.

The fuse for EHOME's decline: the IEM ringer scandal

From the middle of 2009 onwards EHOME recovered their commanding form, sweeping forward and winning titles everywhere.

Then EHOME heard a rumour that CH planned to knock them out by playing as ringers for another team. Playing as a ringer had by then moved from a covert practice to an open one in the Dota scene, but the stakes were high, and 71 was furious the moment he heard. He decided to answer in kind and had his own players act as ringers for another team in order to knock CH out. It worked and CH were beaten, but someone reported the substitution. After various investigations the organisers ordered the match replayed. EHOME really should have realised at that point that the ringers had been spotted.

71 insisted on using ringers again, and the organisers made a point of moving the replayed match onto the GG platform, where IP addresses could be recorded.

EHOME did not know that before the match. Afterwards the IP records were clear and the evidence conclusive. The ringer scandal was fully exposed, opinion was in uproar and the condemnation of EHOME poured in. Only then did EHOME realise that this open secret was not something that could be brought out into the open.

The 2009 IEM ringer scandal had far reaching effects on every part of EHOME. First they were banned from IEM. The prize money there was 50,000 yuan and they had already reached the final, so money they could have won with their eyes closed was gone, and they were vilified as well. Morale across the team was badly damaged and they did not train at all for two months, which cost them the titles at the next two big tournaments, including SMM, the one with the largest prize money of all. It is worth mentioning that the IEM and SMM titles that year both went to FTD, led by 2009.

Call it fate.

Brother 7's character and EHOME's second rise

At the end of 2009, GK and DGC left.

After the ringer scandal 71 sent a letter of apology to his five players, and 820, as captain, worked constantly to calm the players and hold the group together.

In 2010, 820 brought in KingJ from FTD and BurNing from CH and rebuilt EHOME:

820, 357, BurNing, KingJ and Daidai

At first nobody had a fixed position and the team was still settling in, so results were poor. Then, at the Beijing regional final of WCG, EHOME dropped into the losers bracket and were mocked by Caomei, a player on Deity, who was in the winners bracket and who is not the same person as the Caomei of the League of Legends era. In a fit of anger 71 staked 5,000 yuan on a side bet, so that whoever won the match would take 5,000 yuan on top of the title. EHOME's players won that match, and their morale came back with it.

Writing this, I have to say that Brother 7, meaning 71, really was a character.

ESWC, where 820 made his name on the world stage

EHOME then lost to FTD in the ESWC online qualifier in 2010, but won the national team selection with a perfect record and earned the trip to France. At the ESWC grand final, held at Disneyland Paris, EHOME took the world championship with another perfect record. In that tournament 820 made his name through his outstanding understanding and use of the hero Vengeful Spirit, so much so that IceFrog, the creator of Dota, named a hero in the game after him.

Ten titles, and the decline that followed the peak

Back in China EHOME were irresistible, winning ten titles large and small in a row and earning the nickname the Ten Crown Kings. Even so, at the end of 2010 820 was still earning 2,500 yuan a month, and discontent inside the team kept rising.

820 was unhappy about it too, but he wanted the five of them to leave together if they were to leave at all. Then something happened that shocked him. He learned suddenly that BurNing and KingJ had been signed away by DK for a transfer fee of 60,000 yuan each. It affected him deeply. He was angry that people had gone behind his back, and he stayed on purely because he could not swallow it.

820 says a great many people abused him online at the time, saying that BurNing left because 820 wanted to take his core position. In fact 820 had played many different positions. He says BurNing left partly because of the poor pay and partly because, as 820 saw it, BurNing wanted to lead a team of his own, not because the two of them were competing for a position.

In 2011, EHOME assembled another new roster.

Guoshiwushuang, LongDD, 820, 357 and Daidai

820 wanted to play a core position but did not play well there, so he moved to a support role. EHOME's results were poor from then on and they took second place at three or four big tournaments. Through this period the abuse aimed at 820 online was constant. He felt very hard done by. Given the upheaval the team had been through, he thought, playing at that level at all was already no small achievement.

The abuse never stopped, but 820 kept holding the team together anyway.

The million dollar Dota 2 invitational in Cologne

In 2011, with EHOME doing badly, 820's authority inside the team steadily shrank while 71 took more and more of the decisions, making large changes to everything from in-game direction to the substitution of players. Tensions inside the team kept escalating, and 820 thought the team was close to breaking up. It was at that moment that the Dota 2 invitational in Cologne, with its prize of one million US dollars, came along.

820 says they were fortunate. In 2011 all the strong Chinese Dota teams were making internal changes and all of them had internal quarrels. 820 believed that a team could only be strong if it was united, so he asked everyone to set their grievances aside for the moment and put everything into playing this one tournament well.

The Dota 2 exhibition tournament at the Gamescom trade fair in Cologne, held from August 17 to 21, 2011, drew 16 of the world's best professional teams with its one million dollar first prize. On the final day, August 21, EHOME lost 1 to 3 to the Ukrainian team Na'Vi, or Natus Vincere, and finished second.

820 speaks of that match with regret. They came very close to winning. But they had played about ten matches in a row that day, they had used up most of their strategies and their stamina could not keep up. A loss is a loss.

Second place was worth 250,000 US dollars, and 820's share came to 300,000 yuan. Together with the prize money he had earned over the previous years, it was enough.

Back in China, 71 asked 820 for a private talk and suggested he take a rest. 820 agreed at once, with only a slight sense of loss. After so many years he was attached to EHOME. Carrying his regrets and his resignation, he looked one last time at the team he had fought for and left.

In 2012, 820 became a full-time Dota caster. He is now a well-known esports caster who appears regularly at the major events, and he also runs a rather good Taobao shop of his own.

This card game is not over. 820 has simply moved to another table and is still playing.