In between watching Dota matches I just wanted to talk a bit about how teams are chosen to compete in the International (TI). Skip this post entirely if you give no fucks about Dota (this is the last wall of text I promise).
Valve runs a year long league called the Dota Pro Circuit (DPC) in which professional teams travel all around the world to compete in various tournaments. They are awarded DPC points based on their performances in these tournaments. At the end of the year, the top 12 teams who got the most DPC points are directly invited to TI. In addition to this, near the end of the DPC season, Valve also runs regional qualifiers for all 6 major Dota playing regions (NA, SA, EU, CIS, SEA, China) for the 6 remaining slots at TI. The participants of these regional qualifiers typically consist of teams who could not qualify on the basis of their DPC points, but they also have some other teams who have to go through qualifiers due to rules about roster changes and such.
We now have our two finalists for this TI.
The first team is PSG.LGD (yes, that PSG). They are a Chinese team and China is widely considered the strongest region for Dota. They have the most high quality players, teams, professional organizations and tournaments and the amount of competition there ensures some extremely high quality Dota comes out of that region. LGD are the best Chinese Dota team and probably the best team in the world. They are overwhelming favorites to win the entire tournament and have been even before we knew when and where this edition of TI was going to happen. So far LGD have played 15 games at this TI and their win/loss record is 13-2.
The other finalist is Team Spirit, the winners of the CIS regional qualifiers. They're a young team and I believe it's the first time any of them are participating at TI. They're not a particularly well known or famous team and nobody really expected them to go too far in the tournament. In fact, in the first 2 days of the group stages, they lost 6 games and were on the verge of getting eliminated. Then on the third day, something changed and they started playing like they had nothing to lose. They won their next 8 games and reached the main event. They lost their first match at the main event and dropped to the lower bracket which meant every subsequent match was an elimination match. And since then they have absolutely dominated everyone who has had the misfortune of coming up against them. They eliminated the 2 time defending champions and the best teams from the SEA, CIS and EU regions. It has been a joy to watch them play the game.
And now, we've reached the last match.
This final is a match between the titans of Dota against the fearless underdogs. You could not write a better story for this tournament.
The TI grand finals start now
EDIT : fixed an error
