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Dota 28 years agoAndreea "divushka" Esanu

Evil Geniuses to Starladder|i-League semifinals

The sole CIS survivors from SL|i-League group stage, Vega Squadron, got kicked out from the tournament by Evil Geniuses in the opening series of the playoff. 

Lots of fans showed up today early in the morning to fill up Minsk-Arena and support Vega Squadron in their do or die best-of-three series versus Evil Geniuses.

Game One

The first game of the series brought back into the spotlight old school heroes for EG, like the signature Outworld Devourer of Artour "Arteezy" Babaev from almost two years ago and the retired Faceless Void of Saahil "UNiVeRsE" Arora, the man who invented the offlane Void.

It was a very one sided game for EG, who took control of the map once Syed Sumail "Suma1L" Hassan finished a nine minute Blink Dagger on his Batrider and started to hunt down Vega. Finding themselves out drafted and outplayed in a grand style, all Vega could do was to backfire on small mistakes made by EG, but unfortunately for them there weren’t many apart from one wasted Chronosphere that allowed the Russians to secure the first kill under their name 15 minutes into the game.

A glimmer of hope started to grow in Vega’s hearts with the BkB finished on their Gyrocopter, which would neutralize the Devourer orb attacks, but EG’s coordination in team fight and their initiation setup with Winter Wyvern’s ultimate into Chrono was way too strong and the Russians admitted their defeat at the 40 minute mark.

Game Two

For the second game, Vega Squadron came up with a much better draft strategy, focused on huge split push power and globals to boost the early game. EG felt confident they could match Vega’s late game casting Arteezy on Lone Druid with a Radiance bear and boots of travel to stop the crazy push power of an Aghanim’s Nature’s Prophet buffed by Lycan’s Howl.

Although Vega played a good split push game, constantly forcing EG to come back on their side of the map to push back the lanes, when it came to actual high ground push and team fights EG displayed again superior coordination and better decision making. Even when they were forced to fight without big cooldowns available,  EG  managed to punish all Vega Squadron’s attempts to breach high ground on the back of no less than  four Aghanim’s Scepters and especially when two of those were built on the supports who proved to be the actual damage dealers in teamfights.

Getting seriously outplayed, Vega lost the battle after a couple of team wipes and with that they are now the first team to exit the competition while EG are the first to advance into the semifinals.

Evil Geniuses will meet LGD tomorrow, January 16th at 08:00 CET for a spot into the grand finals of Starladder|i-League.

Because of technical problems at the beginning of the day, the schedule is already delayed by approximately one hour, the Alliance vs Team Secret game is expected to start at least one hour later than it was initially announced, depending on how long the CS:GO playoff game will take.

According to the Starladder admins the Alliance vs Team Secret should start around 15:30 -16:00 CET instead of 14:00 CET.

headline image from Na'Vi 's twitter account

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Andreea "divushka" EsanuI can resist anything but temptations... Follow me @DivDota

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