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.