As most Defense of the Ancients 2 (Dota 2) enthusiasts know, August is the time of year where all the DotA fans can come together as one to watch and appreciate the best DotA players in the world. This year The International has a record breaking pool prize of around 24 million dollars.
Day one opening ceremony
The Internation Seven got started earlier this morning at around 10 AM, and the show started off with a dazzling drama intro by e-sports and DotA 2 personality Sir Action Slacks and a Cameo by the owner of Valve himself - Master Gaben as we like to call him.
The opening day of The International featured the first part of the quarter finals which featured two upper bracket games and four best of one lower bracket elimination games. This year the upper bracket is composed of eight teams with four Chinese teams specifically Newbee, Invictus Gaming, LGD, and LGD: Forever Young, one Philippine team TNC, one CIS team Virtus Pro, and two western teams Evil Geniuses and Team Liquid.
Invictus Gaming defeats Team Liquid
The first game to start The International was a duel against tournament favorites Team Liquid and Chinese underdogs Invictus Gaming. In game one Invictus Gaming last picked the DotA 2 greed hero Alchemist while Liquid gave their star player Miracle his patented hero Invoker.
Game one was pretty one sided as Liquid had such a hard time keeping up with the farm of Invictus Gamings Alchemist so this led to a very quick and decisive game one victory for Invictus Gaming. In game two Invictus Gaming went with the same core hero with Alchemist but Liquid answered back with a push strategy that did not leave room for Invictus to farm and that resulted to Liquid evening the series out one game to one.
In game three the Chinese team showed just how much they did their homework on Liquid as they destroy them with clutch plays by XXS.
Evil Geniuses sink to lower bracket
After a big upset by Invictus Gaming, Newbee was poised to keep the ball rolling for the Chinese as they took on The International five champions Evil Geniuses.
Everyone thought it was a going to be a closely contested match but Newbee simply just outclassed Evil Geniuses with sick and amazing plays by Kaka. Evil Geniuses got destroyed 2-0 and was sent to the lower bracket to face DotA 2 legendary team Team Secret in an elimination match tomorrow.
This showed just how good the Chinese teams in this years The International are. Tomorrow we will see another set of upper bracket games against Chinese teams. It seems like this tournament is carrying the theme China Vs The World.
