Team Infinity call out SA Dota Pro Circuit organizers over ‘unfair’ tiebreaker changes

The Dota 2 Winter Tour of the DPC 2023 is winding down soon with some expected winners across several brackets and a few new surprises nobody saw coming. While all of the games were exciting to watch, with the good came the bad as well, and certain developments were happening in the South American region that was less than savory.

Team Infinity, formerly known as Infinity Esports, are a prolific Dota 2 team primarily playing in the SA region. Recently, they encountered some trouble dealing with the ESB administration over last-minute changes that were not initially announced. This has led to a lot of problems for their players and the coach of Team Infinity Mariano “Papita” Caneda had something to say regarding the matter.

According to what Papita posted, the ESB administration made sudden changes to the rules of the DPC by introducing additional tiebreaker matches that were not initially supposed to be there for certain places in the DPC. While tiebreakers are generally used for the teams in first and second place, and on occasion second and third place, they have never been used for teams who have bagged third place and below.

With beastcoast leading the SA charts at 7-0 followed by Evil Geniuses at 6-1, Infinity sit in third place with a 3-4 record. Incidentally, the fourth-place Vivo Keyd Stars, the fifth-place Alliance.Latam, and the sixth-place Thunder Awaken have all achieved a 3-4 record, tying them with Infinity in terms of score. This prompted ESB administration to initiate last-minute tiebreakers for all four teams, something which caught the teams off-guard.

This announcement then spurred a response from Infinity’s coach Papita, who said this ruling was never supposed to be the plan and the decision to break the ties would be based on which teams won more against each other. Now with most of their players, along with several players from the other teams in the tiebreakers, not in the boot camp anymore, new problems have arisen.

Papita further adds that ESB administration has been unwilling to budge from their position, telling players to forfeit their games if they cannot make it to the tiebreakers. Expectedly, this has caused unrest among the players who were forced to fly their way back due to the last-minute announcement, which was told to the players less than a day before the games were supposed to take place.

As unfair as this seems, the tiebreakers will be going forward as planned. What happens from this point on is yet to be seen, but this is still a developing situation and we will keep you posted.