Man. MAN. Two days of International goodness, and I’m reeling. I’m staggering around my room mumbling ‘Black Hole Black Hole RIKI WHY DID THEY PICK RIKI Black Hole Black Hole’ and pawing at my screen in the hope it’ll produce more delicious competitive Dota goodness. There have been so many games. There have been so many upsets. And there’s still more. Thank goodness for that.
Na’Vi, the winners of last year’s tournament and heading into this year’s as the favourites, haven’t been performing quite as well as everyone had hoped, currently sitting on as many losses as they are wins. They’re an odd team to watch right now, with bursts of brilliance completely overshadowed by terrible flops, where the team just seems to buckle. Hopefully they’ll get their act together shortly and sort themselves out.
Another disappointment has been mTw, winners of Dreamhack earlier in the year, especially impressive when it was Na’Vi that they beat. They’re 9 losses to 3 wins right now, and they’re really going to have to start playing up to the competition if they don’t want to be securely fastened into the winner’s bracket.
Mouz and M5, too, are both sitting at the bottom of Group A, with 2 wins and 10 losses each. That’s not good, especially when they’re supposedly some of Europe’s best teams. Which brings us to the dominators. The ones who can’t seem to put a foot wrong. You’ve got iG, who have lost a single match, and look pretty ridiculously strong right now, and then you’ve got LGD. Who haven’t lost. At all.
It’s a little sad that two Chinese teams are dominating the scene so hard. There’s no problem with China being a strong nation at the game, but as a spectator you can’t help but wish that there was more of an even footing across the globe, so that the different metagames could clash, and you could never quite be sure what’s going to come out of it. A foregone conclusion isn’t exactly the most exciting thing, and that’s why last year’s International was so incredible.
But we’re not done yet, and there’s still one more day before we head into the Tournament stage, where it’s full on knockout stages, and we’re going to have even more upsets. Let’s just hope they’re the right kind, and we get some incredible tense matches out of it all.