As we slowly close out the month of June, it also means that we are a bit over a month away from The International 7 (TI7), Valve’s very own yearly Dota 2 tournament. Come 7th August, we will see the top 18 teams from around the world battle it out for the ‘Aegis of Champions’ as well as a share of the whopping prize pool of US$15,818,505 (from the most recent observation). Valve has also recently announced the top six teams to receive a direct invite. They are:
- OG
- Virtus Pro
- Evil Geniuses
- Team Liquid
- Invictus Gaming
- Newbee
Aside from the directly-invited teams, there will be an additional 12 teams with invites earned during the Regional Qualifiers, which are divided into four regions – Europe, China, Southeast Asia and Americas. The European Qualifier will feature both the winner and runner-up as well as the winner of the CIS qualifier, which is still considered under Europe. China and Southeast Asia will see the top three teams of the qualifier while America will have its winner and runner-up and the winner from the South American qualifier.
The format of TI7 will see all 18 teams battle it out in two Round Robin groups and the bottom team from each group will be eliminated. This will be the first time teams get eliminated from the Round Robin stage at a TI event.
While the regional qualifiers starts from 26th to 29th June, the open qualifiers will begin on the 22nd to 25th June. If you’re interested and have what it takes to go all the way to the regional qualifiers, you can sign up here. Some notable mentions that are included in the regional qualifiers include Team Secret in the Europe West division and Natus Vincere, Team Empire and Vega Squadron from the CIS region. The entire Chinese regional qualifiers features familiar faces while the Southeast Asian regional qualifiers will have our local boys: Fnatic and Mineski as they hope to make it to the main event.
The North American region will feature notable teams like Complexity, Team NP, Team ODD (TI6 first runner-up) and Digital Chaos while South America has four invited teams into its regional qualifiers and has six slots available for the open qualifiers.
