PVP Esports Championship preview and predictions

PVP Esports Championship is the first Dota 2 LAN event of the 2018-2019 competitive season. However, because of Valve’s decision to have a much smaller number of Dota Pro Circuit events this season, this tournament could not be included among them. As a result, PVP Esports Championship does not offer any qualification points for The International 2019 and serves just as an opportunity for teams to play some high-level Dota, practice their strategies against some of the world’s best competitors and earn a bit of money. I say a bit because in Dota 2, prize pools are often quite high, but if we disregard that aspect then $300.000 is not exactly an insignificant amount.

PVP Esports Championship is scheduled to take place in Singapore between October 5th – 7th.

Participants and format

PVP Esports Championship brings together 9 teams. Some of them are world-class tier 1 competitors while others are totally unknown, at least at this level of competition. It certainly looks like the tournament organizer, MET, wanted to promote the local Dota 2 scene from lesser-known regions and as a result we have participants from Australia, Singapore, Thailand, India, Indonesia and so on.

The 9 teams that will be competing in this event are the following:

LGD

Team Secret

Fnatic

KSY

Team Admiral

Resurgence

HashtagDota

Signify

BOOM ID

The tournament will be played in 3 stages: Group Stage, Playoffs Group Stage and Main Event.

During the Group Stage, every team will play a Bo1 match against every other team. However, only the bottom 6 teams from the list mentioned above will take part in this stage. At the end of this stage, the top 3 teams advance to the second stage.

The Playoff Group Stage consists of 2 groups, A and B. One of these groups will consist of the top two seeds from the Group Stage plus a directly invited team. The other group will consist of the 3rd seed from the Group Stage plus 2 directly invited teams. The top 2 teams from each of these groups advance to the Main Event, which consists of 2 Semifinals (Bo3) and a Grand Final (Bo5).

Prize pool distribution

PVP Esports Championship offers a prize pool of $300.000, which will be distributed among the participants in the following way:

1 st place: $80.000

place: $80.000 2 nd place: $40.000

place: $40.000 3 rd – 4 th place: $20.000

– 4 place: $20.000 5 th – 6 th place: $11.000

– 6 place: $11.000 7th – 9th place: $6.000

Top contenders

Needless to say, by far the most likely teams to win at PVP Esports Championship are PSG.LGD, Team Secret and Fnatic. And of these 3 top contenders, PSG.LGD is significantly stronger than the other 2, being the TI 8 finalist and one of the strongest teams in 2017-2018. Arguably, PSG.LGD was the most stable team of The International 2018 and the only reason why it didn’t win the Aegis of Champions was that OG had an absolutely miraculous run at the event.

Going into PVP Esports Championship, PSG.LGD is likely to claim the title while Team Secret is the most likely runner-up.