Beastcoast’s roster has essentially been the only name to watch in South America for the last nine months, but the entire region was thrown into turmoil when the top team did not continue their domination in the ESL One Los Angeles Major qualifier playoffs.
The first move into an insane few days was Thunder Predator jumping out to a strong start in their first Dota Pro Circuit qualifiers of the season, going 3-1-0 overall in Group B and becoming the first team to qualify for the playoffs.
TP has been around for a few years, but this newer roster hasn’t seen much action in the current DPC, having last competed together in the International 2019 SA qualifiers and placing fourth. Since then, they have attended strictly tier two tournaments and won a majority of them.
Meanwhile, beastcoast started out with a pair of sweeps over some weaker teams before losing to FURIA Esports in a pretty convincing series and then splitting the final match with Infamous. That pushed the top three teams in Group A into a tiebreaker to decide which two rosters would move on.
It lasted three rounds, with FURIA beating beastcoast, beastcoast beating Infamous, and Infamous beating FURIA two times in a row. This is something that rarely happens considering only one of those teams needed to lose a second time to end the tiebreaker.
Infamous ended up losing to FURIA in the deciding game after beastcoast finally managed to beat the newer roster. But that didn’t mean beastcoast looked much better in the playoffs as paiN Gaming was able to beat them in game one of the playoffs.
Unfortunately for paiN, game two was given to beastcoast by default due to an admin ending the game because paiN was having issues reconnecting to the game, thus keeping the game paused for longer than the rules allow for. Because of that, the series was tied up despite paiN holding a solid kill lead in game two, which opened the door for beastcoast to take the series in the deciding game.
TP continued to look very strong, crushing FURIA in a 2-0 sweep and then doing the same to beastcoast and claiming the top seed in the Major from SA. Overall, the new entrants lost just two matches through both the open and closed qualifiers will hopefully provide the region another strong team to watch on the international stage.
Meanwhile, beastcoast shook off yet another loss and finally managed to secure two back-to-back wins over FURIA, eliminating their opponent and taking the second spot for themselves.
Something looks off with Steven “StingeR” Vargas and his crew, which they will need to fix before the ESL One Los Angeles Major begins on March 15.
