South American Dota narrowly avoids decimation in first wave of TI 2023 eliminations

The first phase of Dota 2’s The International 2023 is in the books and South America barely avoided a total collapse as all four of its representatives were on the chopping block. In the end, only two SA teams are packing their bags to join Team SMG and PSG Quest on the first flight out of Seattle.

SA has not had a strong showing this year to kick off TI12 with four teams attending. At the end of Phase One, all of them were either eliminated or sitting at the bottom of their respective groups, leaving SA fans searching for answers.

Thunder Awaken was the first team eliminated from TI overall, recording the worst record of the entire group stage at 1-7. This is a steep decline from the organization’s underdog run to a fifth-place finish at TI11 last year—though this was an entirely new roster that just scrapped into the event through regional qualifiers.

The most surprising early elimination from SA is beastcoast, who entered TI12 as a dark horse candidate to make a deep run with a revamped lineup. Unfortunately, the Peruvian team that is largely credited with starting the international resurgence for SA Dota failed to win a signal series and is heading home with its worst placement since first riding the waves at TI10 after a 0-2 loss to Gaimin Gladiators.

Evil Geniuses just managed to avoid a similar fate, sweeping a veteran SMG lineup in the only tiebreaker round of the first phase to keep their run alive. Similarly, Keyd Stars, the other regional qualifier team from SA, was only spared a tiebreaker because Talon Esports swept Quest in the final Group D matchup.

SMG and Quest both appeared in their first TI this year but with vastly different rosters in terms of experience. SMG entered TI12 as a massive underdog but fielded a lineup with a combined nine TI appearances split between MidOne, No[o]ne, ah fu, and Januel.

They added another four years of experience and a TI7 victory when MinD_ContRoL was brought in as a stand-in due to visa issues, but that wasn’t enough to survive this year.

Quest has no players on its roster that have attended even a single TI before but were coming in with the confidence to challenge anyone. That carried them to a 2-2 record on day one before they were sent packing by Tundra and Talon in subsequent series sweeps. 

That does not mean either of the surviving SA teams is safe just yet, however, as both were selected by the top seed from another group that wants to play them in the seeding round for next week’s playoffs. EG will face Tean Liquid and KStars is going up against LGD Gaming, while reigning TI Champions Tundra, who also finished at 7-1 alongside LGD and Liquid, selected nouns as their opponents.

Team Spirit was the final top seed and had the most dominant showing of any team thus far at TI12, ending day one already locked into the playoffs. They finished out the group stage at 8-0, sweeping EG, and totaling only three games over the average match duration for phase one—41 minutes and 11 seconds. 

Phase two of The Road to The International begins with Spirit taking on Shopify and LGD facing KStars at 12pm CT on Oct. 14. This will decide seeding for the playoffs, which start on Oct. 22.