Will the new TI format work better?

The International is the most prestigious tournament not just in Dota 2, but esports in general. And its format remained unchanged for many years. But now, all of a sudden, Valve has decided to change the rules.

The company’s announcement came just a few days after the other big announcement, related to Counter-Strike’s professional scene. The changes will certainly lead to a different kind of experience not just for the teams but for the audience as well.

The new TI format

The International 12 is scheduled to take place between October 12-29, which means that it will take nearly three weeks to complete. That’s considerably more than the usual 11 days.

Another big change has to do with the number of phases. There will be three of them in total.

In phase one, the 20 teams will be divided into four groups of five. Each group will use the round-robin format. Every match is best-of-two. The bottom team is eliminated. The rest of the teams advance to phase two. This second phase features just eight matches.

Essentially, the 16 competitors fight for the eight upper bracket slots. And the method of determining who goes to the upper bracket is simple: each match winner becomes an upper bracket team.

The seeding for the eight matches depends on the phase one results. Each group winner gets to choose an opponent from a different group. A1 picks between B3 and B4. B1 picks between A3 and A4. And so on.

The playoffs stage format is identical to the one used at previous editions of The International, with one improvement: the first round of the lower bracket will consist of best-of-three matches.

Arguably, overall this TI format is less rigorous than the one used in previous years. Apart from the Bo3 improvement for the lower bracket’s first round, the teams will get to compete against fewer opponents and will ultimately have their playoffs seeding determined by a single match. That’s not very good for the top teams.

Usually, a really good team will do better than a weaker team, but not necessarily in a particular match. The overall result is what used to give the TI format its rigor. When there are 10 teams in a group and the top four of them advance to the upper bracket, you know for a fact that the best teams will play in the upper bracket.

But when everything comes down to how well you play against a single opponent, that can lead to surprises.

Header: Valve Corporation