The tournaments in this year’s Pro circuit are coming one after another. Literally days after the GESC Minor Indonesia, it’s time to head back to Sweden for another season of DreamHack.

Eight teams will go to the Monster Energy DreamHack Studios in Stockholm, for a chance of winning those valuable qualification points and the $300,000 prize pool.

Qualification Points

Just five days after DreamLeague there will be yet another Major, which means that the teams still have a chance to obtain the precious qualification points.

Teams such as Virtus.Pro have already qualified for the International 8 by winning two Majors in a row. Others are not as fortunate and continue trying to keep up with the top teams in the world. For instance, EG just won the GESC Minor, which gave them a chance to grab onto a spot in the top eight teams.

Format and Participating teams

The format for DreamLeague Season 9 is pretty straightforward – eight teams, six of which had to go through regional qualifiers. While the other two teams are directly invited based on their current standings in the official pro circuit leaderboard.

There will be two brackets where teams will fight in a Bo3 format, while the Grand Final will be a Bo5. Like we said before, all pro players believe that the Bo1 formats should be excluded from official tournaments. This is mainly because of the “randomness” that they can provide. Having that in mind, a Bo3 format is more than welcomed here.

Participating Teams

• Direct Invite – Team Secret, Team Liquid

• SEA Qualifier – Fnatic

• China Qualifier – Newbee

• EU Qualifier – OG

• CIS Qualifier – Team Empire

• NA Qualifier – Immortals

• SA Qualifier – paiN Gaming

The quality of the participating teams is a sure sign that we this tournament is worth watching. Having that in mind, we can clearly see that some teams are in a way better position compared to others, which means that you can take advantage of it and bet without that big of a risk.

Our Favorites

Team Liquid

Like we have said many times, there is no way in which Team Liquid can’t be considered as a clear favorite. They are simply the most dominating team in the past year and a half and they surely have no intentions to stop.

Having said that, their current “rank1” spot is highly contested by Virtus.Pro, which are absolutely dominating in the recent tournaments.

Luckily, VP are not taking part in this Minor, because they have already secured their spot for TI 8. This means that Team Liquid have little to no competition and they definitely need a win if they want to secure their spot for TI. Miracle- and MinD_ContRoL are in an awesome form and if they play their cards right, they will lead the team to success.

Team Secret

Much as Team Liquid, Secret are in a similar situation. They were considered to be the top team for some time, but their recent performance proved wrong.

The European team failed to achieve anything major in the past couple of tournaments, which resulted in a disappointment for the squad.

Most recently, TS lost against Newbee at the Bucharest Major, which meant a one-way ticker home for the squad.

However, they are still ranked pretty high in the official leaderboard, which means that they just need to do get as much qualification points as possible in order to get a that sweet TI 8 Spot.

Fnatic

After the roster change, Fnatic are still struggling to find their place among the best.

Despite that, the team’s chances of getting a direct invite for TI are slowly coming to an end, mainly because of the tournaments that are remaining.

This means that they will have to give everything they have in order to obtain some qualification points. Their most recent performance was at the GESC Minor Indonesia, where they lost in the quarterfinals to the CIS team – Na’Vi. This came as a shock, mainly because of the ambitions that this team has.

Fnatic are the best SEA team for sure, but in the modern Dota this is simply not enough. They need to step up their game and try to show the western teams that they are a force to be reckoned with.

Newbee

The Chinese teams are really underperforming this year.

Their performance can be described as unstable, because in some tournaments they completely stomp the competition, while in the others they are just a random tier 2 team.

This applies partly to the Newbee as well. Sccc’s team showed why they were the TI 7 finalists at the ESL One Genting, where they managed to do some insane comebacks and ended up winning the entire event.

Newbee are currently in 4th place in the official leaderboard, so they need to step up their game and if they do, that means a guarantee spot for TI 8.

Final Thoughts

DreamLeague Season 9 is a Minor, which means that it will be not as exciting as the upcoming Major. Despite that, for some teams this is a vital part of their road to TI.

Some teams such as OG for example, have an awesome line-up, but somehow they are still lacking team synergy, which shows in their results. They recently did a roster change in the face of Resolut1ion, who left the team.

Which team will win? Do you think that there will be any uspets? Let us know in the comments down below.