The biggest esports tournament of the year is underway and upsets are already happening.
The International Dota 2 Tournament (TI) is one of esports' crown jewels. Since its founding in 2010, the tournament has grown from a small niche event to the biggest esports event in the world, at least in terms of prize pool. This year the winning team will take away over $33 million.
Two of the teams vying for that prize this year are Team Liquid and Team Newbee, who just met in the Group Stage of TI9 which will determine the bracket for next week’s main event. The all star roster of Team Liquid is stark contrast to the relative unknowns of Team Newbee. Liquid was coming into TI9 with a head of steam, winning or placing highly in the most recent Dota 2 tournaments. The Team Newbee roster was fairly recently cobbled together from various sources and has found middling success up to this point. Most fans expected Liquid to win in a walk.
Most fans were wrong. Newbee soundly defeated Liquid in both games in the group stage matches. In game one of the match Liquid never really had a chance, they trailed Newbee in kills for almost the entirety of both games. For half of game one Newbee had double the kill count of Liquid. None of the Team Liquid players even broke into double digits on the scoreboard in this series. Neither game even passed the 50 minute mark.
With 115 characters that can be played in multiple ways, dozens of viable strategies, a complete lack of regulations controlling team rosters and a developer who is willing to make major changes to the game immediately before tournaments, Dota 2 is probably the most volatile esport in existence. Upsets like this one are common and dynasties are non-existent. There have been eight Internationals and no team or player has won the tournament more than once.
This volatility makes Dota 2 as fun to watch as it is difficult to wrap the mind around. Even with all this amazing tournament drama the opacity of the game is a big barrier to entry for a lot of potential fans.