Last night, American team “Evil Geniuses” took home a prize of over $6.6 million dollars. This makes them not only the winners of the largest prize in eSports history, but also the first North American team to win DotA 2’s International Tournament.
In a beautiful best-of-five Grand Final, Evil Geniuses were able to defeat the Chinese team CDEC. While EG was considered the least likely to win, they managed to pull out a 3-to-1 victory despite having to play a best-of-three game against team-to-beat LGD Gaming only hours before the title match. This is an amazing feat, and one that the team likely will remember for some time to come CDEC, having won second place in the tournament, will be taking home a prize estimated at $2.8 million.
Every game of the Grand Final was fascinating to watch, and on the whole it was a great improvement over TI4’s anticlimactic Grand Final, where ViCi Gaming was forced to call the “GG” within 20 minutes in a 3-0 defeat against Newbee. In fact, the entire TI5 series has been one of the most exciting yet, with underdogs comming out on top and well-established teams-to-beat barely able to get past the first bracket.
TI5 also boasted the most heroes picked in the International, with very few heroes being left out of the ban-pick process. Hopefully this means that TI6 will have an even greater meta-game as Valve continues to balance DotA 2 in upcoming patches, as well as adding new heroes to the game.
If you missed it, don’t worry! You can watch it below.
