Vici Gaming wins the DreamLeague Season 11 Major

The 3rd Major of the Dota Pro Circuit is over and the winner is a totally unexpected team from China. Vici Gaming had to win the StarLadder ImbaTV Minor to even get to the event and then managed to surprise everyone with some brilliant strategies.

Defeated Opponents

No less than 4 top teams got crushed by Vici Gaming and I’m pretty sure they will be watching those replays over and over, to see what happened there. Team Secret, PSG.LGD, Fnatic and Virtus.pro had their chance and came very close to beating the DreamLeague Season 11 champions. But it wasn’t to be.

Just when people started to think that Team Secret and Virtus.pro had the current patch figured, it turned out that Dota 2 is so complex that even the best strategies have counters. And Vici did exactly that, ruining everyone’s timings with counter-timings of their own. With unforeseen power spikes and lane combos that hadn’t been used before during this patch.

Other Surprises

Apart from Vici Gaming winning the DreamLeague Season 11 Major in a totally unexpected manner, two other teams succeeded in scoring a lot of points at this event by beating arguably stronger opponents. These teams were Fnatic and Keen Gaming.

Keen finished 5th – 6th but Fnatic finished 3rd! Keep in mind that this team was regarded as an underdog at the start of the tournament. And still, they somehow managed to play in the Upper Bracket Finals and came very close to beating both Vici Gaming and Virtus.pro.

Among the powerful teams that got eliminated much sooner than people had anticipated, we had Team Liquid (13th – 16th), EHOME (13th – 16th), Forward Gaming (13th – 16th), Ninjas in Pyjamas (9th – 12th) and Evil Geniuses (7th – 8th).

Overall, this was a very eventful Major where we had the opportunity to see a lot of counter-strategies from some of the underdogs, which totally took the big teams by surprise.

Moving forward, only 2 more Majors are left to be played and we have yet to see the likes of Team Liquid and OG compete at their full capacity. In OG’s case, the team has recently been reunited with ana and they now play in their TI 8 formation again. Which means, be prepared for upsets in the European qualifiers. Because the TI 8 champions are probably back.