About the organizer
The company Valve organizes the championship The International 2018, it will be helped by absolutely different representatives of various famous organizations - from ESL to PGL. The competitions in The International series always differ with its perfect organization, an absence of delays in broadcasts and good feedbacks from players, so every esportsman dreams to visit the event and the TI Dota 2 major tournaments have been the main tournament of the year since 2011.
The tournament has a “World Championship” status and has an unusual hype due to it’s hosted once a year. Also, organizers always make “an unusual surprise” for Dota 2 fans. For example, two new heroes were announced last year, an all-stars match and a match against AI were played. It’s unknown what will be this year, however, there are rumors that Valve will have to reveal its Dota 2 card game - Artifact.
The format
18 teams will take part in the competition, eight of which have received direct invitations due to Dota Pro Circuit points. The rest ten participants were determined with a help of regional qualifiers in Europe, CIS, China, Southeast Asia, South and North America.
The distribution of slots by regions:
- North America - 3 slots
- Europe - 1 slot
- China - 2 slots
- Southeast Asia - 2 slots
- CIS - 1 slot
- South America - 1 slot
The group stage will be hosted on August 15-18. All participants will be divided into two groups with nine teams in each one, where they will play bo2 Dota 2 live matches by a Round Robin system. The top four teams will go to the upper bracket, according to the results in groups, and the teams that hold the 5th-8th place will start their way from the lower one. The roster that places the last place in each group will be eliminated.
The playoff stage is scheduled on August 20-25 and it will be run in a double-elimination bracket with bo3 matches. Only the first round of the lower bracket will be played in a bo1 format and the grand final will be hosted in a bo5 format.
The prize pool
A sum of the prize pool and its distribution are unknown at the moment as it is formed by the fans of the game - 25% of each purchase of Battle Pass, its levels or in-game treasuries are sent to the prize pool. Initially, Valve gave $1,600,000 and at the moment of writing, the monetary reward has become bigger to $20,000,000 keeps raising. For example, the final prize pool of The International 2017 amounted $24,787,916.
The distribution of the prize pool (% of the general sum):
- 1st place: 44%
- 2nd place: 16%
- 3rd place: 10,5%
- 4th place: 7%
- 5th-6th place: 4,5%
- 7th-8th place: 2,5%
- 9th-12th place: 1.5%
- 13th-16th place: 0.5%
- 17th-18th place: 0.25%
Besides money prizes, a team will earn a trophy in the face of Aegis and six rings and a name of each player of the winning team will be added to the Aegis that is situated at a fountain of each side in the game.
The venue
Traditionally, the tournaments in The International series were hosted at KeyArena in Seattle, however, it is being reconstructed right now, so the championship will be carried out at Rogers Arena in Canada this year. The stadium is a home arena of the team Vancouver Canucks, which competes in National Hockey League and it includes 19,000 people (from 18,000 to 20,000 depending on the event). It became widely-popular due to the fact that it hosted the Winter Olympic Games 2010. It’s worth to notice that The International will be hosted in Canada for the first time.