Preview of Dota Asia Championship: Teams, Groups, Format

Recently Perfect World, the organizers of the upcoming major tournament Dota Asia Championship 2018, seeded the participating teams for the group stage. Let’s take a closer look at the tournament’s format, list of participants and groups.

Many people consider Dota Asia Championship to be a “mini-TI”, and its format proves that they are quite right. The tournament will feature whooping ten days of competition between some of the most prominent Dota 2 teams from all over the world. The event will take place on March 29th – April 7th at Shanghai Oriental Sports Center and feature a $1,000,000 prize pool. The tournament’s line-up consists of 16 teams, 6 of them were directly invited and the other 10 made it through the regional qualifiers: one from each Europe, South America and CIS, two from Southeast Asia and North America, and three from China. The complete list of participants looks as follows:

Participating teams

Invited:

• Invictus Gaming
• Newbee
• Team Liqui
• Vici Gaming
• Virtus.pro
• Team Secret

Qualified:

• Mineski (Southeast Asia)
• TNC Pro Team (Southeast Asia)
• Keen Gaming (China)
• LGD Gaming (China)
• VGJ.Thunder (China)
• OG (Europe)
• Effect (CIS)
• Evil Geniuses (North America)
• OpTic Gaming (North America)
• paiN Gaming (South America)

Unlike many other tournaments, which adopted GSL format for their group stages, Dota Asia Championship will feature a full-fledged round-robin group stage with two groups of eight. The matches will be held in the best-of-one format. Top two teams from each group will advance to the playoffs, two worst teams from each group will be eliminated. The teams placed 3rd-6th in each group will advance to the Breakout, a one-round best-of-three single-elimination bracket. The winner of each map will advance to the next stage, while the other teams will be eliminated.

The playoffs stage will be held in a double-elimination format, with first two rounds of the lower bracket being best-of-one, the regular matches best-of-three and the grand finals being best-of-five.

Undoubtedly such impressive list of participants and the format which was chosen by the organizers make Dota Asia Championship one of the most interesting event this season, the event indeed feels like a major.