Day three at the Winter Major group stage in Shanghai started with huge drama and strong statements from Valve but we shall all be reminded that this is a six figure prize pool tournament dedicated to teams and players that worked their way to Shanghai.
Therefor let’s take a look at what happened in the first part of the day in the group that features the first ever Dota 2 Major Champions OG, the Chinese Legend LGD Gaming, the TI 4 Champions, Newbee and the reassembled Team Archon, one of the qualified North American squads.
According to all possible statistics and to the community general belief, OG should finish the day as front runners and so far they are on a good start winning the first GSL match up against Team Archon with 2-0. With that score they were the first team to advance into the qualifier series.
The two Chinese teams left to save the region’s pride, Newbee and LGD Gaming had to face each other in the other GSL match. LGD took the first game with a draft that revolved around three strong cores, Jugerrnaut, Spectre and Enchantress that enabled them to survive the heavy ganking oriented draft of Newbee and eventually win the late game battles.
Newbee continued to emphasize the early game heavy push strategy for game two as well but this time they secured the EnChuaNtress along with a Zhang 'Mu' Pan Invoker and an offlane Beastmaster for Meng '2lei' Lei. They stomped LGD in a 21 minute short game and pushed the series to a game three.
Unfortunately for ChuaN, the Enchantress was once again claimed first by LGD and coupled with a Phantom Lancer for Maybe and a Liu 'Sylar' Jiajun Juggernaut. Newbee chose to avoid big team fight as much as possible and tried to outmaneuver LGD with a split push tactic with Ember Spirit, Morphling and Invoker.
After a much more balanced game with back and forth skirmishes across the map LGD claimed the spot into the qualifier match next to OG.
Heading right into the losers match against Team Archon, Newbee made sure they survive to see the decider final series of the day and took a convincing 2-0 victory over Jio 'Jeyo' Madayag’s team. Team Archon was knocked on the fourth place in the group C and will start the Shanghai major main event from the lower bracket.
Group C continues with the winners match up OG vs LGD Gaming where the winner will be first to advance into the upper bracket while the losers will play the decider match up against Newbee.
