TI9
Yesterday saw the final of The International 9, the Dota2 World Championships, hosted for the first time in Asia, in the Mercedes-Benz Arena, Shanghai.
On one hand, TI has been a little repetitive over the past couple of years - the prizepool is huge, the format is complicated, there’s only so much you can do with an event of this nature, and Valve already appear to be doing it. On the other, the tournament will always have a special place in my heart, and the storylines it creates are always fantastical, no matter how the brackets might turn out.
This year was no different. World champions of two years ago, Team Liquid, were unceremoniously dumped into the lower bracket and had to fight through from the BO1 stage. EG broke their third place curse - by coming 5th. Home favourites PSG.LGD couldn’t quite make it to the finals, crashing out in third. Alliance and Navi both played in a TI for the first time since 2016, and heartbreakingly didn’t meet one another at any point in the tournament. VP imploded after having reached the upper bracket. NIP sucked, amidst their organisation being embroiled in a massive scandal outside of the server. I could go on and on and on.
The biggest story was of course OG, last year’s champions. After finishing only 10th in the Dota Pro Circuit, they barely made it to the event without having to go through the qualifiers again. Their wunderkind safelaner, Ana, had only returned to the team in March after having taken a break from competitive play. No team has ever won two TIs, but nobody seemed to have told OG that their Cinderella’s ball shouldn’t go on this long. They battled through the upper bracket, beating some of their old teammates on EG along the way and relegating PSG.LGD to the lower bracket final before coming up against Team Liquid, off the back of a miraculous lower bracket run, in the final.
And honestly, they kinda stomped them. The way they played was sublime. After this performance, they are arguably the greatest team in the history of the game. Ceb, the coach who was never meant to be a professional player, is now a two time world champion. N0tail, a player who I’ve followed since he was on Fnatic.eu in 2012, is now the highest earning esports player in the world, with just shy of $7 million in earnings. Jerax has gone from being on the QPad Red Pandas to being one of the best supports in the world. Topson has transitioned from pubstar into competitive monster. And Ana has managed to casually carry his team to victory on the game’s biggest stage twice, all while seemingly largely apathetic about the whole affair. They even made it onto the beeb.
Going to a TI is one of the foremost items on my bucket list, and it was announced that next year the event will be held in Stockholm, making it much more feasible for me to actually go. I’m full of hope.