The second day at the Shanghai Major main event marked the end of the road for all the Chinese teams attending the event. China had five representatives at this Major, two of them got eliminated in the first day of the main event, and the other three have been kicked out from the bracket today.
Round two of the lower bracket
- Henrik 'Admiral Bulldog' Ahnberg, Interviewed by Kim 'Dray' Larsson (Swedish)
Alliance versus EHOME.
Alliance got their comfort heroes while EHOME went with an unconventional approach, sending CTY into the safe lane on a hero that he never played in official games, Darkseer. Having Akke on Enchantress, one of his favourite heroes, Alliance scored the first blood and also killed the Radiant Courier on the back of an early rotation from Akke into the midlane, behind the tier one tower. Bulldog had a dominant performance into the bottom lane, solo killing Cty multiple times which boosted his farm tremendously.
However, the game was quite close and it was decided around the 35 minute mark when EHOME was way out of their base, ganking s4 in the Roshan pit which allowed the Tiny-Io relocate combo to take down the first tier three tower in the top lane along with one of the barracks. Despite really good defense from EHOME who finally got their Black Hole into the Wall of Replica combo fully executed and killed four of the Alliance heroes - followed by an easy Aegis for themselves, they weren’t able to capitalise on the momentum.
EHOME’s high ground push was unsuccessful as they decided to force the issue without two bear summons and Alliance focused and eliminated the beast, correctly identifying the key siege element for EHOME. This rendered the Lone Druid Aegis quite useless and created space for the Tiny –Io to relocate and finish the job in the top lane.
Following this rat attack, EHOME continued to push for high ground in the mid lane but Bulldog didn’t allow them to achieve their objective and solo pushed the bottom lane and started chipping away the exposed mid lane barracks with his Necronomicon units and the two boars.
From there on it was just a matter of time and patience for Alliance who forced buyback after buyback and eventually took the game which marked EHOME’s elimination from the Shanghai Major
compLexity versus LGD.
compLexity relied on comfortable picks with a Tiny for Limmp and a Lone Druid for Chessie, LGD did the same , putting Sylar on his main hero Phantom Lancer and MMY on Earth Spirit. This was an action-packed game with a lot of skirmishes, deciding the balance of the game.
MMY had a huge impact in the game, landing his spells in most of the team fights which caused a lot of troubles for Swindlezz on his Tidehunter. Regardless of the slow start for the North American team they managed to find the farm on Tiny and by the 30 minute mark they were already too tanky for LGD to take down in team fights.
Having an Aegis advantage coL grouped up and made a team effort into pushing LGD’s high ground which was much more efficient than the rat attempt from Sylar who was lacking the damage and was not able to force a defensive retreat from compLexity.
OG versus Virtus Pro.
This game was the story about the almighty Miracle Sven. OG picked heroes that are very focused on team fighting with some massive ultimates. Enigma, Death Prophhet and Tidehunter were the stars of the series and allowed OG to survive the best-of-one game versus Virtus.Pro
Although VP showed tremendous resilience and managed to repel OG a few time, once OG decided to make an attack on the high ground, they eventually lost the game in only 35 minutes.
Fnatic versus Newbee.
This was the slowest game so far in the main event. At the 14 minute mark the game was even, with a scoreboard reading only 3-3, when Newbee attempted to take down Roshan and got interrupted by Fnatic but with no success as MidOne’s Puck got killed along with Mushi’s Sven, and Hao on his Spectre took the Aegis.
While very little was happening on the rest of the map, the Ohaiyo on Broodmother was continuously pushing the top lane. At the 25 minutes mark, the game deciding fight erupted in the mid lane in a very messy way. Fnatic won the fight due to much better coordination, and a great Glimpse from the Net Disruptor, resulting in a kill on the Hao Spectre.
Newbee displayed terrible fight coordination throughout the entire game and totally lost the control on Fnatic’s cores which in the end got them eliminated from the Shanghai Major.
image source
Eight teams have already left the competition and eight more are still fighting for the Winter Major title.
Shanghai Major standings:
13th-16th place: $30,000: CDEC Gaming, Vici Gaming, Team Spirit, Team Archon
9th-12th place: $45,000: EHOME, LGD Gaming, Virtus.Pro, Newbee.
