Preview of ESL One Germany 2020
Ihor MatusGeneral information
As a reminder, the Dota 2 tournament will be taking place from 5 October till 1 November. There will be sixteen contestants that will share the overall prize pool of $400,000. Eleven out of them have been invited directly by the organizers while the other five teams had to go through the closed qualifiers. Winstrike, mudgolems, Yellow Submarine, EXTREMUM, and Tempo Esports passed the closed qualifiers whereas Team Secret, OG, Nigma, Team Liquid, Alliance, NiP, NAVI, Vikin.gg, HellRaisers, 5men, and Cyber Legacy got the direct invitations. Cyber Legacy was supposed to be accompanied by Virtus.pro, however, the management of the club announced that all the VP gamers got benched so the team lost any chance to take part in the event with $400,000 as a prize pool.
The championship starts with the group stage. It will not take place in two groups with eight contestants in each as we are used to but it will be held by the Swiss system. Eight best teams will make it to the playoffs. At the final stage, the contestant will face each other at the double-elimination bracket. All the battles apart from the grand final will happen in the Bo3 format.
This championship will be quite interesting as there will be different teams that trigger lots of questions. Will Team Secret keep their winning series? How will Natus Vincere, the roster that used to perform as FlyToMoon, play? Will there be a principal meeting between Cyber Legacy and Natus Vincere, and if yes, how will it end? What will we see from the teams that joined the event after the closed qualifier?
Favorites
Team Secret is definitely our main favorite here. Puppey and his teammates keeps on dominating on the European stage. If we take into account the fact that Europe must be one of the strongest regions at the moment, Secret is objectively the strongest team in the world now. Clement deserves the right to be called one of the brilliant drafters and VP.Prodigy, that played at the grand final of OGA Dota PIT Season 3 against Secret again proved his status in the interview. The likelihood of their participation in the playoff is not even discussed. The only question to Team Secret that we may ask is “Will the Europeans continue their series of victories?”.
We also expect to see a good performance from OG, Nigma, Team Liquid, and Alliance. Unlike Secret, all the mentioned above team are predictable but we should wait for them at the final stage. Especially if we take into account the fact that more than a quarter of contestants are teams from CIS. Topson from OG has recently celebrated the birth of his daughter and he had less time to practice with his team. Besides, he was too busy to play Dota so he was temporarily inactive. This factor is not extremely important but, nevertheless. it can affect the performance of the Europeans. Nigma has mixed results. At OGA Dota PIT Season 3, they were not able to show an excellent result. The team took 7-8 position in the tournament bracket getting beaten by NAVI and VP.Prodigy.
The list of the teams that will be interesting to watch includes Natus Vincere as well. ALWAYSWANNAFLY and his teammates used to represent the tag FlyToMoon and now they have moved to Natus Vincere. This happened only thanks to the fact that NAVI decided to have all their gamers benched. After the transfer, we think that Andrey ‘ALWAYSWANNAFLY’ Bondarenko and his teammates will be motivated to show their best side. At OGA Dota PIT Season 3, the team took 4 place, so we do not see any premises to the bad performance of the team at ESL One Germany 2020. We think that NAVI is the strongest CIS team at the championship.
In our humble opinion, we may say the same about Cyber Legacy. MagicaL and his teammates have recently been invited to ESL One Germany 2020 instead of Virtus.pro. The management of VP reported about the transfer of all their gamers to inactive so the team will miss the championship. Cyber Legacy is represented by the former gamers from Natus Vincere that were kicked out of the organization. That is why we expect them to have a battle with NAVI to see the principal battle that is going to be fascinating. The only thing that makes us worried about Cyber Legacy is the fact that the team’s last official match took place at the beginning of September. Then, by the way, the team got defeated by the gamers from NAVI that were still performing as FlyToMoon at that moment.
Outsiders
We see that the main outsiders are represented by the teams that got qualified in the closed elimination round: Winstrike, Tempo Esports, EXTREMUM, Yellow Submarine. Now the CIS Dota is not living through its best times so we do not expect to see Winstrike and YeS joining the final stage. Yellow Submarine was assembled before the start of the qualifiers and the team managed to pass through the open qualifiers. Winstrike got collected at the middle of July and when young G joined Natus Vincere, the team had to look for a replacement for the gamer. The help came from yamich that was leased from Khan.
In total the participants of the closed qualifier have had no practice at official matches recently. They played only with the other participants in the try-out. Now they are to see stronger teams and they are hardly prepared for the fights with them so we treat Winstrike, YeS, EXTREMUM, and Tempo Esports as outsiders. In our opinion, mudgolems look more confident in comparison with the others and we would not like to call them weak.
HellRaisers is also considered to be outsiders as the team is coming to the championship with substitutes. There are only three people in their main roster: Nix, xannii, and Funn1k. At the qualifiers the team was represented by Nongrata from FlyToMoon 2.0 and DyrachYO from Team Spirit. There is still no information whether the gamers are going to help HellRaisers at the main stage.