The string of major Dota tournaments and LAN finals continues as the second season of DreamLeague arrives upon us. The lastest version goes global with a completely new format and now includes teams from all over the world fighting for a minimum $100,000 prize pool. The format and the schedule of the tournament now stand revealed.
DreamHack announced the second season of ASUS ROG DreamLeague Dota tournament starting from 13th of October. This tournament will have two LAN phases, with a week of offline matches at the Monster Energy DreamHack Studios and the LAN finals at DreamHack Winter 2014. While the first season involved teams from Europe and North America only, the new version will have teams from Asia as well. The group format has also been altered, and instead of just the one large group, there will be four groups of four teams each: Europe West, Europe East, Asia and North America. The top three teams of each region last season are invited to participate again this time, amongst those are the champions, Alliance, and the runner-ups, Cloud9.
Europe East Division
Team Empire
Natus Vincere
Virtus.Pro
One Qualified team from the Europe East Qualifiers
Asia Division
Invited team TBA
Invited team TBA
Invited team TBA
One Qualified team from the Asia Qualifiers
Europe West Division
Alliance
Fnatic
Two Qualified teams from the Europe West Qualifiers
North American Division
Cloud 9
Evil Geniuses
Two Qualified teams from the North America Qualifiers
The tournament will be played out in three phases, the first being the group stages where each team willl play three Best-of-1's against every other team in their group. The top two teams from each group will make it to phase two which will be held offline at the Monster Energy DreamHack Studios. This phase will involve a round-robin Best-of-2 format, and out of the eight teams, six will qualify for the LAN finals at DreamHack Winter 2014 which will be a double-elimination bracket. Notably, the top two teams of phase two will obtain an advantage in phase three.
The tournament begins on 13th October and the first phase continues till the 5th of November. That will be followed by the LAN phases starting from 17th November and running upto the 29th. The Europe East qualifiers have already started with the Asia, Europe West and North American qualifiers set to follow (in that order).
The basic prize pool for the tournament is, as last time, $100,000 but DreamLeague plans to release at item bundle along with the ticket which will add to the prize pool. The last edition saw the final prize pool reaching around $265,000, and it will be interesting to see if the community will show similar enthusiasm for DreamLeague in this congestion of Dota tournaments.The tournament coverage will handled by GD studio again and we will get to see the personalities we associate with DreamLeague again. The coverage will be available on Twitch and Viagame.
James “2GD” Harding – Host
Bruno “Bruno” Carlucci – Analyst / Co-Host
Andy “Draskyl” Stiles – Commentator
David “Luminous” Zhang – Commentator
News and Picture Source: dreamhack
