After a entertaining final day of the group stage, the playoff brackets for TI8 are set. I had made an error in my previous post and had said that only 6 teams from each group made the playoffs when in fact 8 teams from each group advanced. So only two teams were eliminated today instead of the six I had thought. That means that Invictus Gaming and paiN Gaming will be the only two teams not advancing to the main event and each will be taking home just over $60,000.
Invictus had no games scheduled for today and had to watch as Winstrike stole one game from OG which tied the two teams for the final playoff spot in Group A, forcing a tiebreaker game. Winstrike overcame the favored Invictus Gaming squad and secured a 2-0 victory and kept their tournament hopes alive.
The biggest surprise of the day was Optic Gaming who went from being last place in Group B to securing a spot in the upper bracket of the playoffs. They always had to play in a tiebreaker along with Team Secret and Newbee. Both Secret and Optic defeated Newbee pushing them both into the upper bracket for Mondays' main event.
The main event will mostly be best of 3 matches. The exceptions being the first round of the lower bracket, which is a best of one, and the grand final, which is a best of five. I personally find the first round of the lower bracket being best of one to be quite crazy since anything can happen in a single match and the winner of the match walks away with at least $240,000 more than the losing squad. Pretty high stakes for a one and done match up.
The main event starts on Monday and viewers can catch all the games on Twitch.tv, in the Dota 2 client or possibly on Valves new streaming platform Steam.tv. Steam.tv is not fully live yet but is rumored to be going live along side the main event. Reportedly you will be able to watch games alongside friends with your own chatroom, helping to avoid the disaster that is your typical twitch chat. I will be checking out the new platform if it goes live this week and I'm hoping it helps enhance the Dota 2 viewing experience.
