Learning Gamesense and why it's the most important thing to learn

Seeing more and more posts about people being stuck at an mmr, and not wanting to repeat whats already been said before, I thought about the main things that's helped me over the last 5 years, and the one thing that sticks out is learning gamesense. (I know this might not apply to the majority on here so apologies if most of this is somewhat 'obvious')

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I would define gamesense as having a preconceived idea of how things will play out before they do, thus informing your own decisions based upon this. This is a vast topic so I will try and condense this thought to a few paragraphs.

Items: Have a preconcieved idea of what heroes build which items, thus, you will either be prepared for the use of the item or have started building the counter items before the enemy has their item.

Example: Clinkz

It's extremely likely he's going to get an orchid and run around picking people off. Because I know this is a core items on the hero, I will either get linkins,manta,euls, glimmer or BKB. Other heroes/spells also impact this purchase (they might only have 1 magical damage source - maybe bkb isn't the best, your hero does well with agility items - maybe manta is better than the others, small mana pool/regen - euls sounds good.

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Spells: Having a rough idea of what spells/builds people normally go allows you to play around this.

Example: Tide has level 6 and a blink dagger

This is a really obvious example but, we all know tide is going to skill ravage after level 6 and has a blink dagger. There's an upcoming teamfight and he's not shown on the map. We can make an informed guess that he want's to ravage as many heroes as he can. We can then play around this by purposely clumping then blinking or forcestaffing away at the last second, OR, we wait until he has thrown ravage then we jump in and follow up. This applies to soo many scenarios: pudge has taken hook first and missed, we know the cooldown, we know thats all he has, we know we can man up on him. We saw CM use frostbite and we need to TP, we know we can. etc etc

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Map Awareness: We can use this to know when it's safe to push, when it's safe to show on a lane, know where we can jungle safely.

Example: We saw 4 heroes tp into a fight top, we can assume it is safe to push/show bottom because it will take 4 heroes a long time to reposition across the map.

We can also use the map to show us where an enemy has a ward or sentries. If I watch very closely the enemy when I move to an area near them, if they move away, we can make an informed judgement of vision based on that. People are actually very obvious when doing this and 90% of the time are unaware of their 'bodylanguage'. they will make slight movements to the side, stop showing entirely, move 3 heroes in your direction. Again we can also abuse this by making enemies move towards you and then tping to the other side of the map.

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Above mechanical skill, if you can 'git gud' at doing this, the games become also somewhat predictable. And the best part is, it's all just knowledge. You don't need to have lightening quick reactions and be 14 yrs old. The one major thing it does require is time and effort to learn heroes and builds. If this is something you struggle with 'Oh I'm against X but I have no idea what they will skill, when they will skill it or what items they are likely to build' then the best piece of advice I can give, is go off, and thoroughly learn that hero, even if you have 0 intention of playing it. There is no shortcut for experience. At least for me. I will never have the reactions I did when I was 10 years younger but I can learn through experience. If you watch smufs or boosters you will see (as well as having great mechanics) that their gamesense is the main thing that allows them to go 20-0.