What an amazing comeback victory for Invictus Gaming to steal the first Major of the season from the hands of the Evil Geniuses at the Singapore Major.
Fans were calling it over when EG jumped into an early 2-0 series lead. It was looking very grim into Game 3 and with enough patients and combined with positioning, Invictus Gaming turned it all around. It even produced a great new meme for all fans to use.
Zhou “Emo” Yi dropped the know famous “?” when Artour “Arteezy” Babaev stood there and accepted his death.
We do not get many reverse sweeps or let alone a full five game set. So, this was a welcoming experience especially with the limited number of tournaments this year.
Considered a success
The Major itself was successful, with the exception of Navi and Beastcoast pulling out due to COVID-19. However, the format itself isn’t perfect. PSG.LGD played the most game as they went through the wild card and all the way into the playoffs to finish third.
Majority of the tournaments are won by teams having to go through the lower bracket and playing more games. Invictus Gaming did it this tournament, The International 7 where Team Liquid stormed back to win it. OG is of course the exception winning TI8 and TI9 through winners and being the only team to win two Aegis of Champions.
They should consider moving forward to have teams play more against each other to setup the playoff bracket so teams can get more than a handful of games before the games start to matter. I understand they want to keep the major within a two-week time frame. There are options, perhaps playing all games in a best-of-one could work, and each team will play at least 15 games and if there are tiebreakers there can be more.
DPC points and prize pool was by far the worst structure in any Dota 2 tournament, and it won’t see any changes until 2022’s DPC season.
Terrible award system
How can Valve justify having teams to compete in a tournament that can potentially solidify their entrance into The International 10 and not award all teams with money and DPC points?
Here’s the list of teams that made money and DPC points, the rest just essentially got a “free vacation” and was forced to stay inside a hotel and when they lost they got the boot to fly home immediately.
Hence why the management team from Navi and Beastcoast decided to not attend the event when they know they won’t be reaching the point of earning points and money. But most importantly they did not risk themselves to more COVID-19 exposure or exposing it to others.
The first tournament during a pandemic has shown how relaxed the rules are in different areas. Although Singapore has a good record with the virus, they should have flown every team in and force teams to go through a two-week quarantine. In doing so, Navi, Beastcoast and may other teams that had to replace a player due to COVID-19 could have competed.
Players need to be accountable
It’s not all on the tournament organizers, players themselves have to hold themselves accountable. How can they be so reckless having to compete and qualifying to a Major and then going out to catch COVID-19 and letting it derailed everything? Hope this is a wake-up call before the next Major and the eventual TI-10.
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