Dota2 Pro Circuit 2022 Stockholm Major Begins

For the first time in more than two years, a Dota 2 Major will welcome a live audience to watch some of the best teams in the world clash for positioning on the Dota Pro Circuit as ESL hosts the Stockholm Major from May 12 to 22. Unfortunately, the Major won’t be without its missing pieces; various global situations have led to Chinese teams missing the event and multiple teams in attendance needing to play using stand-in players instead of their main rosters. Prior to this, the 2022’s Winter Tour was forced to pivot to Regional Finals playoffs featuring the top four teams from each individual region due to a rise in concerns surrounding COVID at the start of the year.

That is the same format China utilized due to being unable to attend the Stockholm Major, while the remaining five regions sent their qualified teams to Sweden to compete on LAN. With those stipulations, the first Major of the 2022 DPC season will feature a reduced 14 teams, with those teams being split into two groups of seven to open the event with a round-robin Group Stage. Every team in both groups will face each other in best-of-two series, with the top four teams from each moving on to make up the eight teams in the upper bracket of playoffs. The fifth and sixth place teams will also advance to the playoffs via the lower bracket, while the last place roster in each group will be eliminated at the end of the Group Stage. The playoffs will be a standard double-elimination bracket with best-of-three series, up until the grand finals will swap to a best-of-five. In total, teams are competing for their share of $500,000 and 3,530 Pro Circuit points, with the top finishers likely clinching an invite to The International 11 later this year without even factoring in the next DPC Tour and its third Major. And, just like with most larger DPC events, only the top eight teams will receive any prizing. Because teams have been evenly split into groups, most fans will instantly jump to looking at the pairings within each bracket to see which teams have an advantage. However, this is going to be harder than usual because a majority of these teams have not faced each other at all. Some teams, such as Team Spirit and beastcoast, have maintained their rosters from TI10 last October, but outside of those two teams, many of the teams have swapped at least one player or are fielding entirely new lineups. This means we will likely see some matchups for the first time and predicting who will stand above the rest is slightly harder. Here is how the groups are currently formatted, listed based on their region:

Group A	Group B
OG	Gaimin Gladiators
Tundra Esports	Team Liquid
BOOM Esports	Fnatic
T1	Team Spirit
BetBoom Team	Mind Games
Evil Geniuses	TSM
Beastcoast	Thunder Awaken

At the one sizable LAN event that has been played this year, GAMERS GALAXY: Invitational Series Dubai back in March, the two top finishers are featured in Group A BOOM Esports and Tundra Esports. BOOM is an explosive team many predict will make a deep run at this Major, while Tundra is a solid team out of Europe, though they have struggled against other top teams from their region. That would likely have fans picking OG over Tundra, though the team will be playing with Ceb as a stand-in due to Misha being unable to attend, which could potentially throw off their flow. T1 and beastcoast have strong rosters with a history of playing well on big stages, but the latter is known for occasionally having a tough time early on in their runs. However, the two biggest wildcards for Group A are BetBoom Team and Evil Geniuses. EG is fielding a trio of new players that have slowly meshed and turned the squad into a true force coming out of NA, though we have never seen this group helmed by JerAx on a Major stage. Meanwhile, BetBoom is a veteran squad that rose out of Division II in the Winter Tour and qualified for the Major via an expedited qualifier for Eastern Europe. They are the biggest unknown when it comes to facing other top teams. Even with a shaky showing in the Eastern Europe playoff qualifier, it is unlikely anyone will bet against Team Spirit bringing their A-game as the defending International Champions attend their first DPC Major since winning it all last October. And, once you get past Spirit, Gaimin Gladiators and Team Liquid are both threatening rosters that have performed well in Europe and could easily make a deep run. TSM and Fnatic also have veteran rosters with experience playing together, but neither has a recent record of beating top international talent outside of their regions. This duo of rosters were among the bottom three finishers at GAMERS GALAXY and have a lot to prove even while fighting for a spot in the playoffs. Just like with Group A, Group B also has two wildcards that don’t have a lot of experience playing on big stages together or are facing some problems. Thunder Awaken has a new roster that hasn’t appeared at many international LAN events, with captain Farith “Matthew” Puente having the only real experience outside of regional competitions. The team dominated South America’s regional league during the Spring Tour, but we will have to see how that translates to a Major stage. Mind Games would have been a sleeper hit to contend for an upper bracket playoff spot coming into the event, but now the team will be playing without two of its core players Danil “Bignum” Shekhovtsov and Semion “CemaTheSlayer” Krivulya. Both were unable to leave Ukraine and are being replaced by PuckChamp support players Genadiy “Astral” Motuz and Andrey “Dukalis” Kuropatkin for the duration of the Major, leaving some questions to how the roster will mesh in such a short amount of time.

Day 1 of LA Major open qualifiers for Team B8

The first day of open qualifiers for the ESL One Los Angeles Major marked the debut of Danil “Dendi” Ishutin’s new team, B8. The first two matches were easy but the third one, against Team Empire Hope, went up to the 65 minute mark. Even though Empire Hope had good AOE damage heroes against B8’s Phantom Lancer, other heroes were not countered enough. B8 had an advantage in healing, counters, durability, pushing, split pushing and defending whereas Empire Hope had an advantage in initiation, right click damage and mobility.

The worst situation for Empire Hope was when they had the lead and wanted to push on B8’s high ground but they were unable to. They had bad pushing heroes and B8 had good defending heroes. This allowed B8 to buy some time for Phantom Lancer to get a good farm. After a few rough fights, B8 were able to close the game. Empire had a good laning stage, especially for their safe lane Bloodseeker, but as the game went late, he was not effective against B8’s cores. On the other hand, Magnus was the first to reach level 30 and he was a bit effective against B8 but he alone couldn’t do the required amount of damage. Road ahead for B8 B8 will face Hailhydra next and they need to win 3 more series to qualify for the closed qualifiers round.

Cloud9 eliminated from ESL One L.A Qualifiers

Open qualifiers for the ESL One Los Angeles 2020 Major got underway for most regions yesterday and for Southeast Asia, there were a host of teams which were fighting to reach the closed bracket, including Cloud9. Cloud9’s return to the Dota 2 scene was confirmed on January 29th when they announced their latest roster after two years. With some extremely strong names such as Rasmus ‘MISERY’ Filipsen and Adrei ‘skem’ Ong, C9 seemed as though they would be able to make waves in the SEA region where they would be fighting through the qualifiers for the next Major.

While the team were able to make it thorough the first day of the open qualifiers, day two did not go as planned, even after an emphatic victory over Team Uprising to open the day. In the round of eight, C9 were up against Motivade.Trust Gaming, a team that is fairly unknown to most outside the SEA region. Being a best-of-one match at this stage of the qualifier, Trust seemed ready to throw everything they had into taking down their opponents – and it worked perfectly. The loss eliminates C9 from the open qualifiers, not even reaching the closed bracket for the SEA region. While Cloud9 won’t be in the SEA region for the next set of open qualifiers, as they plan to relocate to North America, it will be a long period before they are seen again, with the next Major qualifiers only set to begin at the end of March. The SEA open qualifiers come to an end today, with only four teams remaining at time of writing – and only two spots available in the closed bracket.