You are living under a rock if you haven’t heard about The International ever. It has the biggest prize pool in all of esports and its latest event TI9 had a prize pool of over $30 million dollars. It is a valve sponsored event wherein the best 18 teams of the world come to conquer it all. TI9 was somewhat of a historical event in the sense that OG became the first team to defend their title defeating Team Liquid.
Given the current COVID-19 situation a lot of events have been cancelled or postponed to some future date, there is a lot of uncertainty about TI 10 this year.
Here is our guide to TI 10 and what can be expected from the biggest event in esport:-
Dates:-
First thing first, as of now TI 10 main event is scheduled to take place from 18-23 August,2020 in Stockholm,Sweden. This year too the event will have three stages to it: challenger, playoffs, main event. Teams are expected to compete in any of the four regional qualifiers with the winner and runner ups proceeding to the playoff stage. The playoff stage then decides which of the 8 teams qualify for the main event. The challenger stage usually happens around 2 months prior to the main event. If things get better we can expect the qualifying to start from June.
Venue:-
The main event returns to Stockholm,Sweden at the 16000 seater Ericsson Globe centre. It is the first time after 2011 that the event returns to Europe. It feels like a homecoming as Sweden is generally regarded as the home of esports.
Prize pool:-
The International has a guaranteed base prize pool of $1.6 million dollars which is sponsored by Valve. But the prize pool is expected to increase as it is partly crowdfunded, so we can’t be sure of the final amount which the team will be playing for.
But if I had to guess I would say around 35 Million Dollars of total prize pool! As last year the total reached out to be around 32 Million Dollars, adding 3 more will be a great achievement of Dota TI !
Teams:-
We still don’t have the teams which will participate in the event later this year. The tournament follows a point based system from Minors and Majors. The 12 teams with most points from these tournaments at the end of the DPC qualify directly to the event. The rest 6 teams qualify from the regional qualifiers.
The COVID-19 situation has thrown some uncertainty about the event and with the fourth Minor and Major already cancelled there is a high possibility the event may be postponed to some further date. A cancellation may also be on the cards, but Valve hasn’t commented anything about the event.
