Digital Chaos brought an end to the Chinese domination and elimiated iG.Vitality to round out the first day of The International 2017.
Opening day is brutal for teams starting out their main event journey in the lower brackets. The unforgiving best-of-one elimination series mean that no one is safe and teams have only but one shot for survivial. Earlier in the day we saw Execration, Cloud 9 and Infamous make an early exit.
Things started out as good as Digital Chaos could hope for. Their fantastic rotations were successful in putting pressure on the Sven and shutting down the core heroes. Invictus Gaming.Vitality had a few failed ganks early on as they attempted to regain some footing to avoid falling behind too quickly.
With momentum building Digital Chaos were able to extend their lead to 5k in only 11 minutes as Kanishka 'Sam' "BuLba" Sosale created space and charged forward with a terrifying spirit breaker. The North American team had set the tempo, but Zhang "Paparazi?" Chengjun began to quietly catch up with Sven and their lineup started to hit their stride, hoping to apply a bit more pressure onto DC.
To iG.Vitality's dismay, the rising North American team dominated going one play after another, taking objectives, pushing through objectives, catching out heroes and coordinating combos for stellar team fights. With full map control DC were taking a comfortable lead and rack up a serious advantage going into the mid game.
Smooth execution and a solid performance gave Digital Chaos an overwhelming victory to knock out the only Chinese team in the lower brackets and advance further in the main event of The International 2017.
The action will resume at 10:00 PDT/19:00 CEST, Tuesday August 8th with the best-of-three upper bracket series between LGD Gaming and Virtus.Pro.
