The Defense was one of the first long running online Dota 2 tournaments, put together by ancient Dota fansite joinDOTA. It’s been on hiatus for the past two years but returns today as one of the first major tournaments being ran post-TI5. Phase 1 features tonnes of big time players running with new teammates for the first time after the major reshuffles of the past month. Elements of Cloud9, Team Secret and EG are all represented. Phase 2, which will start at the conclusion of these two six-team groups, will feature another six big teams directly invited to that stage.
You can watch it live here:
As always, LiquidDota is your best bet for seeing a breakdown of the teams and format. The prize pool is starting at $75,000, increased by sales of the attached item bundle and DotaTV ticket. It’s all building to an offline finals, the first in the series’ history.
It sort’ve marks the end of Dota 2’s offseason, which goes from the end of The International until whenever teams start coming out to play serious games again. Usually tournaments wait for the post-TI patch, always a reset point due to the massive changes it introduces to the game, but The Defense has jumped the gun due to its long running nature. The first major LAN after this will be ESL One New Yorkfeaturing TI5 Champions Evil Geniuses on October 3rd, the qualifiers for which are also currently ongoing.