Despite being overlooked by the more famous teams on their group, Indonesia's Zero Latitude bagged the final playoff slot on the ACG invitational after a specific series of events. The single-elimination playoffs will start next week.
With the tied score being decided by winner-over-the-other results instead of tiebreaker matches, the scenarios have changed on group D. Mineski's advantage has increased, as they needed only one win on the series to gurantee themselves of playoff slot. Everlast's chances to advance lies on them sweeping Mineski and Zero Latitude dropping a game against Vie Genius, while zL needs Everlast to sweet the Filipino team and themselves to sweep their match against the Vietnamese team.
But even wiith the odds in their favor, the Filipino team was outclassed quite decisively by their Thai opponent. Mineski was not able to stop Everlast's push on the first game. The second game was Mineski's turn to siege early with an Enchantress, Pugna, Lycan and Shadow Shaman on their team - but they ended up being completely dominated and they gave up nine deaths before taking their first kill. Particulalry impressive was the Thai veteran carry in Bungsellrottee, who has a combined 23-0 kill-death score on two games.
It was Zero Latitude, however, who sneaked up with a playoff slot after completely dominating their Vietnamese opponent, VieG. zL's two straight wins finished at an average time of 17:30, and they secured the spot on the playoffs behind their 2-0 group stage win against Everlast on the previous week.
The two non-bearing games from group C was short work. Orange defeated iDeal within two games to salvage some pride and secure third place on their group, while Scythe finished unscathed after Vietnamese team GameTV decided to forfeit the match.
Aside from zL, fellow Indonesian team RRQ is also advancing after placing second on Group C. The SEA scene is quite well represented, with two Malaysian, two Singaporean, one Thai and one Filipino team rounding up the playoff-bound teams.
While no team of the same country has faced each other on the group stage, that will cease to be the case early on the playoffs. A Singaporean duel between Scythe.Gaming and First Departure is among the four concurrent matches scheduled to jumpstart the playoffs.
The playoffs will start on a similar time next week, 04:00 CET (11:00 SGT) of 22 March. All games until the semifinals will be played, with the entirety of the playoffs following a best-of-three series, single-elimination format.
The winning team of this tournament will walk away with $2,000, while the runner-up and third placer will receive $1,000 and $500 respectively. Merchandise will also be given away, among which are Dota 2 HeroClix Starter sets for all participants.
Source: eClub
