StarLadder i-League Invitational Season 4 Results

Team Liquid celebrated their third Dota 2 Pro Circuit (DPC) win of the season, beating LGD Gaming 3-1 in the grand finals of the StarLadder i-League Invitational Season 4. Team Liquid took home $135 000 USD and 150 Qualifying Points (QPs) per player. LGD Gaming settled for second place, while Newbee and Mineski shared third-fourth place.

The next DPC event will be ESL One Katowice, February 20-25th.

Rosters Locked

On Monday, February 5th, Dota 2 team rosters were locked for the final time before The International 8 (TI8). Teams are required to play with these rosters to qualify for invites to both DPC tournaments and TI8. Playing with a single player sub at a DPC event will result in a penalty to any QPs earned, while a larger roster change means teams will need to take the open qualifier to regional qualifier path.

Notable roster changes occurred in the days leading up to the roster lock. Of the eighteen teams that have acquired QPs so far, ten made swaps, including Virtus.pro, Natus Vincere, Evil Geniuses, LGD Gaming, Fnatic, TNC Pro Team, LGD.Forever Young, Immortals, VGJ.Thunder, and the newly formed Echo International. We’ll see seven of these ten rosters attending at least one of the next two DPC events, ESL One Katowice (February 20-25th) and the Bucharest Major (March 4-11th).

Regional Qualifiers

Taking advantage of the two-week gap between DPC tournaments, organizers of tournaments later in the schedule have tightly scheduled qualifiers this week and next.

The Dota Asia Championships 2018 ran most of their qualifiers this week, with Mineski, TNC Pro Team, LGD Gaming, VGJ.Thunder, Keen Gaming, Evil Geniuses, Optic Gaming, paiN Gaming, and OG winning their berths at the LAN (March 30-April 7th) in Shanghai, China. The CIS region qualifiers are scheduled for February 10-13th.

Dream League Season 9 kicked off its regional qualifiers with the CIS region on February 8th, seeing Team Empire beat Suicide Team 2-1 in the grand finals.

If you’ve missed any of the qualifier action so far, don’t worry as there’s plenty more to come. Dota Asia Championships 2018, Dreamleague Season 9, EPICENTER XL, and GESC: Indonesia qualifiers will continue through the weekend and into next week.

Epicenter XL Casting Contest

This week EPICENTER announced the first group of casters to advance to the second round of its EPICENTER XL Casting Contest. On January 30th, EPICENTER announced a casting contest coinciding with the open qualifiers for their EPICENTER XL tournament, a DPC Major with LAN finals in Moscow, Russia from May 4-6th.

The first phase had casters commentate open qualifier games. To advance to the second round, which involves casting games from the closed regional qualifiers, casters had to receive positive feedback from the community and organizers. The contest’s ultimate prize is the opportunity to cast group stage games at the LAN in Moscow, an invaluable experience for any caster.

The first group of casters to go through to round two includes Grant “GrandGrant” Harris, Nick “breakycpk” Caras, Moxxi, Mamoon “TeaTime” Sabri, and the casting duo of John “johnxfire” Fernandez and Mike “MLPDota” Le Phoenix.

Search the official Valve Dota 2 Majors and Minors Registration site to see if your favorite team is intact or not!

 

About The Author

Esports have become my life. I love silver linings, books, and Dota 2--not in that order. You can follow me on Twitter at @writingdaeja .

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