The International 4 was the fourth edition of the world championship of Dota 2 organized by Valve. Held in Seattle, Washington in 2014, this also became the third consecutive time that the event was held in Seattle. This year’s tournament was held in Key Arena, a multi-purpose arena in Seattle Center with a seating capacity of 17,000. TI 4 was the first international without NAVI in the finals.
Preliminary round
A total of 16 teams took part in this mega-tournament. Of these 16, 14 got a direct invite. 41 teams were invited to the qualifiers and the qualifiers were divided into four zones: China, South-east Asia, Americas and Europe. The winners of the four qualifiers qualified to join the 11 others in the main event. Natus Vincere(NAVI) America edged out fellow Americans Team Liquid in the Americas qualifier to earn their spot, while Malaysian team Arrow Gaming came out victorious against Koreans MVP Phoenix for the South-East Asian spot. LGD Gaming defeated CIS Game to become the fifth Chinese representative as German team Mousesports turned around against Russian team Virtus Pro to claim the European spot.
Main Round
Phase one was the qualification round. Phase 2 was a round robbin stage in which all the 16 members locked horns against each other. The bottom six of this round were eliminated, top two directly progressed to the main event’s upper bracket and the middle eight teams entered a third playoff stage. In Phase Three of the playoffs the eight teams who did not progress to the upper bracket and were not eliminated.
They played to decide the six teams which would enter the upper and lower brackets, with two teams eliminated from the tournament. In Phase 2, ViCi Gaming and Evil Geniuses were the two teams who qualified directly to the event’s upper bracket.
Grand Final
The Grand Final of The International took place between Upper bracket’s winner, Newbee and Lower Bracket’s winner Vici Gaming. Newbee outperformed Vici gaming by a huge gap.
The Finals are often termed as most boring TI finals as most of the games were very short. Also the 2 final team were using similar strats throughout the series. VG draft was pretty bad in all games. NEWBEE thrashed them 3-1 to emerge as winners.
In conclusion TI 4 could not live up to the amazing hype created by TI 3 Finals. But it was still indeed another TI with fun and excitement. The International backstage, the teams, panels, casters, Gaben etc all sweated it out to make yet another successful TI.
Read About Dota 2 TI 3 here. Or click here to read about TI 5. For more Dota 2 related news and articles checkout here.
