‘I’ve got less than a million’: Sneyking reveals the math behind winning Dota 2’s TI11

Winning The International is the ultimate dream of many Dota 2 fans, regardless of their skill level. Fans generally divide the prize money by five to guesstimate players’ earnings from the event, but Sneyking recently shared that the calculations had more than five variables after a viewer asked how much he received from winning TI11 with Tundra Esports on stream.

“I won’t say the exact figure,” Sneyking said. “I received less than a million dollars. TI win looks nice, but on paper, there’s so many fees and taxes, and you don’t end up with that much.”

Though Sneyking didn’t disclose how the TI pie was cut between all parties involved, community members came up with assumptions of how much the players may have gone home with after winning the most prestigious Dota 2 event of each year.

In an ideal scenario with zero liabilities, each member of Tundra would take $1.7 million off their combined winnings. With Tundra potentially taking 10 percent, federal taxes costing almost 39 percent, Sneyking’s earnings would already drop to $930,000 without taking state taxes into account.

This isn’t the first time a TI-winner shed light on the math of lifting the Aegis, however. Two years after winning TI3, Alliance’s AdmiralBulldog mentioned on a stream that he only made about $100,000 after organization cuts and Swedish taxes out of Alliance’s $1.4 million TI3 cheque.

While there will always be additional costs and taxes to pay after winning TI, Tundra also won one of the least lucrative iterations of the event in recent years. Ever since TI4 in 2014, the event’s prize pool has been increasing substantially every year, topping at $40 million in 2021.

In a surprising turn of events, Valve followed a different route with the battle pass while rolling out mediocre content that made fans think twice before purchasing the battle pass. Considering it was also released only a month before the tournament, there was so little time to fund TI11 compared to previous years, hence its lower prize pool of $18 million.