DreamLeague Season 19 group A favorites

DreamLeague Season 19 is a much-needed Dota 2 tournament that doesn’t belong to the Dota Pro Circuit. Back in the good old days, such events were quite frequent during the competitive year. But now they are a rarity and many teams depend upon them for financial reasons.

DreamLeague Season 19 is scheduled to take place between April 9-23, which is perfect for Division I teams. Unfortunately for the likes of Team Secret and Alliance, they will not be able to take part in the competition because they need to play their regular Division II matches.

The reward for the winning team is $300.000 and a ticket to Riyadh Masters, which promises to be a massive event with an epic prize pool.

Competitive format

DreamLeague Season 19 uses a competitive format similar to that of The International, at least for the group stage. The 16 participants are divided into two groups of eight and each team will play one best-of-two series against every other opponent in its group. The best four teams from each group advance to the second stage.

Group A participants and favorites

Here are the teams featured in group A of DreamLeague Season 19:

• Entity
• Evil Geniuses
• Ex-HellRaisers
• Execration
• Gaimin Gladiators
• Shopify Rebellion
• Team Aster
• TSM

The favorites in this group are quite easy to spot:

• Gaimin Gladiators
• Shopify Rebellion
• Evil Geniuses
• Ex-HellRaisers
• Team Aster

These five teams will compete for the four available qualification spots. Of course, we can include other teams as well, but those teams lack either the form or the experience to succeed at this competitive level.

We’ve already seen how the likes of TSM and Execration performed at the Lima Major. Despite being excellent teams in their regions, when they had to travel to a LAN and prove their skills in front of a massive crowd, they simply weren’t able to play half as well as they did from the comfort of their homes.

Online competitions put much less psychological pressure on players than LANs. That is why online results are regarded as being far less relevant than LAN results.

One team that will be interesting to watch at DreamLeague Season 19 is ex-HellRaisers. This participant won Tour 2 in Eastern Europe, which is a tough league, and did it without losing a single match.

On top of that, two of its players are absolute legends who won numerous Majors in their careers: Alexey “Solo” Berezin and Roman “RAMZES666” Kushnarev.

Header: ESL