TI12’s final weekend preview

The last three competitive days of The International 12 are about to start. This weekend, we will find out who the new best Dota 2 team is.

Some say that Team Liquid is going to win, others that Team Spirit, while others believe in Gaimin Gladiators or even one of the two remaining Chinese squads, LGD Gaming and Azure Ray.

Everything will be clarified this weekend. Just eight teams are left in the race. Four of them are fighting in the upper bracket and need just one more victory to secure a top-3 result. The other four are fighting for their lives in the lower bracket and will need to win five consecutive matches to become TI winners.

Obviously, the highest chances of winning the tournament belong to the two upper bracket semifinals winners, which will be decided today.

The International 2023 Bracket — 8 teams vying to lift that Aegis of Champions. 6 players hoping to claim it a second time. Powerhouses in the Upper Bracket. Powerhouses in the Lower Bracket. 3 Days of Dota. One Champion. #TI12 #Dota2 pic.twitter.com/gvZRAlO9el

— Wykrhm Reddy (@wykrhm) October 26, 2023

Schedule

On Friday, a total of four matches will be played. So both the current upper bracket and lower bracket matches will be over by the end of day 1. Four more matches will be played on day 2. So by Sunday, we’ll only have two matches left: the lower bracket Final and the upper bracket Final.

All of these matches are best-of-three, except for the Grand Final, which is a best-of-five series.

On day 1, Valve decided to start with the lower bracket matches. This means that if you’re from Europe, Team Spirit vs. Team Liquid, and LGD Gaming vs. Azure Ray will take place late at night.

Prizes and viewership

The final eight teams are competing for decent prizes, which start at nearly $80.000 for the 7^th – 8^th place teams and end at $1.4 million for the winner.

Compared to previous editions of The International, this is, of course, quite disappointing. We were hoping that TI12 would at least match Riyadh Masters’ prize pool of $15 million, but it’s not even close.

This makes the tournament a bit underwhelming and gives the one from Saudi Arabia a lot more importance, but for now, TI is still TI and lots of people are enjoying it.

During the playoffs, we’ve seen many great matches so far and their viewership has been phenomenal for such a small community. Dota 2 has less than 10 million players, and yet its TI12 matches were viewed by around 700.000 – 900.000 people. League of Legends’ Worlds 2023 has twice as many viewers, but with a community that’s 12 times bigger.

Header: Valve