Dota fans might have felt like they slipped into a time warp, but fear not—the TI3 winning Alliance side really did win a major event last weekend.
The reformed team of Jonathan “Loda” Berg, Gustav “s4” Magnusson, Henrik “AdmiralBulldog” Ahnberg, Jerry “EGM” Lundkvist and Joakim “Akke” Akterhall claimed victory at the World Cyber Arena (WCA) event in China, claiming more than half of the $665,000 prize pool. They defeated TI5 third place finishers LGD Gaming in the final 3-2 in a close series.
With Lundkvist rejoining the team earlier this month, Alliance now has their TI3 lineup back together once again. That lineup was also responsible for Alliance’s last event win, the ASUS Dream League season 1 finals, in June 2014.
Though the WCA tournament did not feature 2015 majors winners OG or Evil Geniuses, Alliance did have to overcome TI5 runners up CDEC Gaming en route to the final.
Alliance did suffer an early wobble, losing to Team Liquid in the group stage, before narrowly securing second place ahead of MVP Phoenix and Digital Chaos.
Just surviving the marathon group stage could well be considered an achievement in itself. The best of two format meant that the matches ran far longer than was scheduled.
Published: Dec 21, 2015 01:06 pm