All Eyes on ESL One Katowice
This week the Dota 2 community was focused on the twelfth tournament in the Dota 2 Pro Circuit. ESL One Katowice kicked off on February 20th with a group stage that seeded the top six teams into a single elimination bracket for playoffs. Evil Geniuses and Team Secret both fell in 5-6th place, with Team Liquid, Fnatic, Virtus.pro, and Vici Gaming finishing in the top four. The final placement of those four teams will be determined on Sunday.
With only two days of the tournament taking place in Spodek Arena, some fans were upset by the format that saw one of the playoff quarterfinal matches played on an earlier day. This was done to ensure no more than three best-of-threes were scheduled in a single day at the arena, but it frustrated fans who wanted to see all the key elimination matches on the Spodek stage. Exacerbating this was the fact that the match pitted two fan favourite teams against each other. Widely considered the top two teams in the world, Team Liquid beat Team Secret in a stunning 2:1 showdown, but then lost 1:2 versus Vici Gaming in the semi-finals.
On Sunday, Team Liquid will meet Fnatic in a best-of-three to decide third place, after which Vici Gaming and Virtus.pro will face off in the best-of-five grand finals.
ESL One Katowice continues through February 25th. Catch all the action on http://live.esl-one.com/.
Credit: Copyright: ESL One | Helena Kristiansson