Although The International 10 is once again in limbo after Valve announced that they might need to find another host city for the biggest esports event of the year, the regional qualifiers are still unfolding on the initially planned schedule.
Eastern Europe and South America are the first two regions to battle for the one spot available for each. Beginning today, June 23 and until the 26th of the month, 14 teams in Eastern Europe and 12 in SA were seeded based on their DPC results in a double elimination bracket.
For B8 and No Techies, that meant to start the qualifier road in the lower bracket pitted against each other right from the first round. While B8 has been around for two years and a half, since Danil "Dendi" Ishutin founded the organization, No Techies was put together by Alexey "Solo" Berezin at the beginning of this year, after his original plan of assembling an all-star line-up didn’t succeed and Just Error ceased to exist after just one underwhelming tournament run.
Led by well decorated CIS veterans, who took under their wing young generation of players, both B8 and No Techies had to play through the lower divisions of both Dota Pro Circuit (DPC) seasons, hence their lower bracket seeding for TI10 qualifiers.
NoTechies
vs
B8
B8 began the series with strong team fight oriented heroes, while also having a hefty amount of building damage secured with a mid lane Leshrac and a carry Luna. Looking to press the issue from early stages, they chose Tidehunter to be their front line hero in the team fights and forced No Techies to fight at disadvantageous timings, which resulted in countless early deaths before the 15-minute mark on No Techies’ carry Spectre. The downhill trend continued for Timur "layme" Magomedov, who finished the game on his Spectre with 11 deaths in total, and thus he couldn’t be the game changing factor, although his team tried its best to drag B8 in a late scenario where they could have been out-scaled.
With one game away from losing any chance at going to TI10, No Techies looked to surprise B8 with an offlane Pudge, but they played into a Dendi Invoker and a carry Phantom Lancer that dismantled them and got eliminated in the first lower bracket round with a 0-2 series score.
While No Techies are now out of the race, for B8 the road has just begun. They will need to survive five more series to reach the grand finals. In the meantime, in the upper bracket, Team Spirit are already in the semifinals after taking down Winstrike 2-0.
TI10 qualifiers will run in all six regions from June 23 to July 10, so stay tuned for the latest updates and get all the scores with our The International 10 tournament hub HERE.
headline image: WePlay Holding
