Upsets, breathtaking team fights and a huge misplay, all happened in the debut series at Pinnacle Cup.
A total of ten teams from Europe and CIS entered this past Monday the group stage battle at the $100,000 Pinnacle Cup. The group play is held in a round-robin; best-of-three series format with the top six teams at the end of the fight securing playoff slots.
Day 1 featured six of the ten participants going head to head and it ended with clean 2-0 victories across the board. But despite all series being rather one sided, the day brought a hilarious highlight.
EXTREMUM
vs
Team Unique - Relocate to enemy fountain
After losing the first game to a mid lane Axe that went for the Manta Style build and an offlane Broodmother that pressured the enemy carry, Team Unique aimed for a stronger laning stage presence in the second game and locked in the Io-Gyrocopter duo in the first phase of the draft.
Their choice gave EXTREMUM a lot of room in the drafting phase to respond and it resulted with Unique having to play once again against strong creep weave clear mechanics and a lot of team fight tools. Nonetheless, the laning stage was much more balanced and even the first blood came only seven minutes into the game after EXTREMUM rotated their Snapfire top lane. From there on, the game went out of control for Unique, as EXTREMUM were forcing them to team fight.
By the 15-minute mark, EXTREMUM were 7k gold ahead and were playing as a unit in the mid lane. A Chronosphere from Dimitry "Nefrit" Tarasich meant to stop Andrii "Ghostik" Kadyk from winning a Duel led to Unique getting caught four heroes inside. Io and Gyro were the only two heroes surviving the engagement, but as Gyro was left with a sliver of HP, his Io tried to save him by relocating to the Fountain. The Tether-Relocate happened, but unfortunately, Danil "Bignum" Shekhovtsov chose the wrong base and killed his Gyro in the enemy fountain.
Second day of the Pinnacle Cup group stage brought two exciting series. Brame and Level Up, who are currently bootcamping in the same facility, kept the fans entertained with their back and forth battle.
Brame, who have recently taken down Alliance, Europe’s top team in the Dota Pro Circuit (DPC), thus delivering the biggest upset in the upper division, managed to also take down Level Up at Pinnacle Cup to start the tournament on the right foot. Their series went to a decisive game three, where Gleb "Funn1k" Lipatnikov gave it a try to an offlane Omniknight. His team fight item build with Mekansm, Pipe, Force Staff hasn’t made the difference unfortunately for Level Up, who are now 0-1 in the group standings.
Unlike day one of group play, the matches played on the second day went all to a decisive game.
Team Spirit
vs
Hellbear Smashers - The upset
As the undefeated team after four weeks of matches in the DPC, Team Spirit were the clear favourites of the series, while Hellbear Smashers were looking to put an end to their 0-5 losing streak from Eastern Europe DPC upper division and they did just that.
Team Spirit started the series by stomping HS in the first game with a Wraith King-Grimstroke combo and a perfectly execute mid Mirana from Alexander "TORONTOTOKYO" Khertek. Heading into the second game, they kept the same chain stun synergy between a carry with a powerful stun of his own and the Grimstroke, but went with a mid lane Sandking and rotated Mirana in the support lines. While in theory, their superior control should have gotten Smashers in trouble, the game turned out to be a display of perfect coordination and huge nuke damage that nullified Spirit’s entire team fight.
Hellbear Smashers took game three victory as well on the back of another perfect Tiny performance from Daniel "Stormstormer" Schoetzau, who along with Luna, Lina and the Warlock Fatal Bonds, made a quick work of their CIS adversaries.
The second round-robin stage of the Pinnacle Cup group stage will give a shot to all teams that got defeated so far to improve their results. Team Spirit will take on Level Up, Brame will be challenged by EXTREMUM, while Vikin.gg, who lost their first series to HellRaisers, will be pitted against Chicken Fighters.
Pinnacle Cup group stage Round 2 starts today, May 7, at 12:00 CEST/18:00 SGT, so don’t forget to head over to gosuplay.net and vote for the team that you think might win the tournament to increase your chance of winning one of the six prizes put in play.
Good luck, have fun!
