In the Chinese regional qualifiers of The International, LGD defends their first seed from yesterday while the rest of the teams moved around in the group. In the end CIS claims the second place with Tongfu.Wanzhou third and DreamTime.NGC fourth.
After day one, it seemed like the top four teams were already more or less decided but things got stirred up right off the bat this morning as upsets happened all over the place. LGD.cdec beat DreamTime while LGD's main squad dropped a game to Black's CIS in quite a remarkable way. LGD's Rabbit finished the game 17-0 with Morphling but unfortunately for him, he was on the wrong team and ultimately lost. The event has already been unofficially named as "the Rabbit award", a sequel to "the Maelk award". The Maelk award refers to a match where Maelk, then part of Evil Geniuses, was playing against mousesports and went 0-20 with Venomancer - but still won the game.
Furthermore, Tongfu.Wanzhou stepped up after a mediocre day yesterday, proving believers that counting them out was indeed premature. They beat HGT, Speed and LGD.cdec, thus turning a 3-3 record into 6-3 which was enough to secure themselves a top three finish. Since they finished with the same score as CIS and since head-to-head is not taken into account, a tiebreaker would be forced between the two teams to settle who'll start in the Winners Bracket and who'll start in the Loser Bracket.
After a poor start in WPC League, CIS have came more into the scene as of late and it was shown in the qualifiers as the tiebreaker for the second place was ultimately won by CIS. They resorted to a four-protect-one strategy around Black's Phantom Lancer whom they successfully created space for. The team kept finding pick-offs and chopped Tongfu to pieces as Black got more and more farmed. This second place was taken by CIS, who will be starting off in the Winners Bracket versus LGD tomorrow.
Two of the favourites of the qualifiers, DreamTime.NGC and ZSMJ's HyperGloryTeam, had some shaky performances and were just able to hang in there by a thread as they found themselves in a tiebreaker scenario for the fourth place alongside the slightly less expected LGD.cdec lead by Maybe. In the end though, it was DreamTime that made it through, they quickly dispatched of HGT using a mid Tiny+Wisp combo and a safe lane Windranger played by Air. LGD.cdec proved to be a more of a struggle initially but after getting a grip of the game, DreamTime played if safe and slow to eventually claim the victory and taking fourth place of the round robin. They will face up against Tongfu.Wanzhou tomorrow in the bracket phase's Loser Bracket.
Overall the Chinese qualifiers so far featured various heroes stepping into the lime light, such as Brewmaster (already predicted by DT's mid player Air to be a steady pick from now on) as well as the Outworld Devourer.
Photo source: http://www.dota2.com.cn/
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