Cybercube tells the story of the TI winners

We congratulate the OG team with their victory on The International 2018!

This contest started in 2011 and since that time TI remains the biggest and most prestigious event on the Major Championship circuit. Today there are 40 players that have won The International, but none of them can boast of a second victory. We decided to have a closer look at the event itself and the players, who made Dota 2 clearly one of 3 main eSport disciplines so far.

In 2009 Gabe Newell and Valve announced the developing of Dota 2 — a whole new MOBA-online game, based on the iconic Warcraft 3 addon. IceFrog, an anonymous game designer, who is considered to be the main original Dota developer, was announced as a chief game designer of the sequel.

The International 2011 in numbers and dates

In August 2011 Valve announced the first view of Dota 2 and the very first competition on it — The International 2011. The event meant to be a part of Gamescom convention and took place in Cologne, Germany. 16 teams faced each other, willing to catch a part of an unprecedented total prize pool of $1,6 million.

The contest took place on August 17–21. Apart from the highest prize pool, The International managed to attract the largest number of online viewers: over 1.5 million people.

As soon as Dota 2 wasn’t available for everyone at the time of The International 2011, all teams received keys to the closed beta version in order to prepare for the contest. Dota 2 released the stable version on July 9th, 2013, almost two years after The International.

Pioneers

Natus Vincere team from Ukraine, more known as NaVi, has shocked the world by taking the 1st place in The International 2011. In their very first professional Dota 2 match on The International, NaVi managed to defeat the GGnet team from the USA on August 17th.

Later that day, NaVi defeated Scythe.SG team from Singapore and left the group stage by overcoming Nevo from Denmark. On the next day, NaVi defeated M5 team from Russia. On the August 19th, NaVi has cleared the road to semi-finals by overplaying the iG team from China.

In semi-finals, NaVi met Singaporeans from Scythe.SG again with the same result.

On the final day, the August 21st, NaVi made history by defeating Chinese top team EHOME with 3:1 on the scorecard. Natus Vincere lost only one game in the whole tournament, which wasn’t enough to get them off the road. Ukrainians took $1 million from 1,6 millions of the prize pool.

The faces of Natus Vincere

This victory has granted NaVi players and NaVi brand the legendary status, because their performance has started multiple trends in the whole eSports community. Cybercube tells the story of every NaVi winning team player, and also about what do they do now.

«Dendi» Danil Ishutin

The one and only NaVi The International edition team player, who is still in the team. Plays Dota since 2005. Just like the ArtStyle, he joined NaVi after playing for the DTS team. In The International finals he started the tend of playing as Pudge. Gabe Newell, Valve CEO, called him the most charismatic eSports athlete of the modern times. Dendi has a popular Twitch streaming channel. Danil is considered being one of the richest Dota players of all time, with the income of $750,000 per career.

«XBOCT» Alexander Dashkevich

XBOCT plays Dota since 2009. After ArtStyle left the team, XBOCT took the carry position. Before the Alienware Cup tournament, analysts ranked him 4 of 10 as a carry, but Alexander’s role as the carry brought NaVi to the victory of this tournament. That has created a tradition of carry position to be the #4 in the team. Before his comeback to NaVi, XBOCT managed to play in a number of worldwide top teams, including Team Empire, Fantastic Five, Team Spirit, HellRaisers and Virtus.pro. He even managed to play in Anji Dota team — the eSport branch of a famous Russian football team.

XBOCT is coaching NaVI since 2017. He also manages his own Youtube-blog with more than 100k subscribers.

«LighTofHeaveN» Dmitriy Kupriyanov

A resident of Moscow, who used to play for Natus Vincere from 2011 till 2013. Dmitriy is considered to be one of NaVi organization founders. His favourite Dota characters are Enigma and Windranger.

In 2012 he managed to take a second place in The International 2012 and win the community score for the best hardliner in the world. LighTofHeaveN started a trend of playing as a hardliner. Now Dmitriy manages his own Twitch streaming channel.

«Puppey» Clement Ivanov

Clement was Born in Estonia. He played for NaVi since the beginning until 2014. Puppey took the vacant captains position after ArtStyle left the team. Clements leadership brought NaVi to the grand finals of The International 2012 and 2013. After leaving NaVi Puppey started his own team called TeamSecret and holds the captain’s position till today.

«ArtStyle» Ivan Antonov

The legendary NaVi captain started playing Dota in 2008. He left the DTS team, the flagman in Dota in Ukraine at that moment, in order to join NaVi. In 2012 ArtStyle left NaVi in order to distract himself from active esports for almost 2 years. He came back to Dota 2 to join the Relax team, which later found fame as Hellraisers. Later he transferred to ScaryFaceZ team, but in April 2015 NaVi management offered him a captain position, which definitely helped the team to pass the qualifying stage and enter The International 2015. After that Ivan took a short vacation and brought NaVi to the victory of SL i-League StarSeries Season 2 tournament and participation in The Manila Major and The International 2016. After working with Virtus Pro team as an invited coach at the Kiev Major 2017, ArtStyle joined Virtus Pro as a regular coach.

There is still one thing to achieve

One special fact about The International is that none of the eight winner teams could ever manage to take the 1st place more than once. The situation is the same with the players: no winning team players could ever manage to win the finals twice. That shows how really dynamic and unpredictable modern Dota 2 professional scene is. Will the OG team manage to do it next year?