Well played boys, well played.
The (mostly) Malaysian Dota 2 team Fnatic had provided a spectacular performance in The International 6, the biggest Dota 2 tournament in the world, and one of the biggest ever prize pools for an e-sports event with USD $20,000,000 to be shared. Roughly 18 million USD were generated by sales of Battle Passes bough by fans and Dota 2 players. Fnatic qualified to The International by going through the South East Asia qualifiers to become one of the 16 teams (18 counting the 2 wild cards eliminated earlier) to grab a portion of the huge prize pool.
Despite a sub-optimal performance in the group stages that ended them into the lower brackets at the start of the double elimination stages, Fnatic made upsets after upsets to claw thier way through the lower brackets, taking down Team Liquid and MVP Phoenix along the way. The impressive dream run of going from round 1 to the lower bracket finals ended slightly short as they lost to Digital Chaos, whose also in a good run of getting knocked to round 2 of the lower brackets. With that result, Fnatic reached 4th place and will bring back home 7% of the prize pool of $1,438,792 (roughly around RM5,700,000).
Congrats to Mushi, MidOne, Ohaiyo, DJ the sole Filipino, and 343 for the impressive run. Knocking out big names along the way also helped made The International 6 an interesting show to watch with big upsets happening.
Hopefully this success will inspire more competitive Malaysian gamers, or even the rest of South East Asia for that matter, that with some hard work, good teamwork and maybe some help with big sponsors (Fnatic is a huge e-sports organisation based in Europe), anyone can live the dream of being a pro gamer.
Header picture credit to Mineski Events Team Facebook page.