If you hope that Malaysian Dota players made a bigger impact in this year’s The International, then it did, sort of. There were four Malaysians playing at the premier Dota 2 tournament with a prize pool exceeding $20 million USD. Fnatic, now only housing two Malaysians, were unfortunately eliminated early on in the group stage after placing last in Group A. MidOne, a former Fnatic player who were there when they reached 4th place last year, also didn’t fare better at Team Secret. They finished 9th place after losing to Team Liquid- the eventual winners of The International 2017.
That left Tue “ahfu” Soon Chuan as the sole Malaysian standing. The support player is playing with Chinese team LGD Forever Young (LFY), sister team to LGD Gaming. LFY looked promising, finishing just above the sister team in the Chinese qualifiers, then went into the Group stages and became the top seed for Group B. From there, LFY blazed through the upper brackets by defeating TnC Pro Team and Virtus.Pro before stumbling against Chinese rivals Newbee at the Winners finals. LFY put up a fight, taking one game from Newbee before going down to the losers. And then they lost to Team Liquid despite being able to take the first game.
Third place is nothing to scoff at. LFY will be taking home at least $2,580,607 USD (roughly RM11,094,030)- 10.5% of the total prize pool and that’s 3.5% more than LGD Gaming that finished third. Note that the sales of the Battlepass is yet to stop, so the prizes will still increase until the end of this month.
Plus, ahfu scored one of the greatest highlights in The International 2017. In game two versus Virtus.Pro at the main event, ah fu managed to steal the Aegis, a powerful late-game item, just as it is dropped after everyone on the opposing side worked hard to topple the Roshan that holds it.
The Ahfu Moment. #TI7 pic.twitter.com/MwqkMxqCQO
— Wykrhm Reddy (@wykrhm) August 10, 2017
The folks at Compete has an in-depth breakdown on what happened here, and why everyone that was watching went hysterical with this crazy move.
In a post-game interview, teammate DDC explains how the idea of stealing the Aegis went through. It was a simple suggestion- but the whole team agreed, ah fu was too determined to back down from the plan.
While we didn’t see a whole team of Malaysians like last year making it big, we see one of them getting the spotlight of their life and a strong finish. Well played ahfu, well played.