Team Yandex and PARIVISION became the first two teams to advance to the semifinals of the Esports World Cup Dota 2 tournament thanks to their wins Thursday in Paris.
Yandex opened the playoff stage with a 2-0 victory over Team Spirit, and PARIVISION added a 2-0 win over Rune Eaters in the quarterfinal stage.
Yandex and PARIVISION will go head to head in one semifinal match on Saturday; the winner advances to the grand final on Sunday and the loser competes in the third-place match.
The Dota 2 event at the Esports World Cup is the final championship of the ESL Pro Tour, now in its fourth season. The tournament has a $2 million prize pool, with $750,000 and 1,000 club points going to the first-place team.
The format consists of three phases: a group stage of 24 teams that competed in a round robin, a survival phase (Tuesday-Wednesday) formatted into a single-elimination bracket that saw four teams advance, then a final playoff stage (Thursday-Sunday), which is single elimination.
The four group winners advanced directly to the playoffs. Teams finishing second through fourth in their groups went to the survival stage, a two-round bracket that decided the other four teams to make the playoff field of eight.
All matches in Phase 1 were two games, while the matches in Phases 2 and 3 are best-of-three until the best-of-five grand final.
On Thursday, Yandex prevailed in 44 and 51 minutes over Spirit, playing on red for both maps. Yandex teammates Alimzhan “watson” Islambekov of Kazakhstan and Ilya “CHIRA_JUNIOR” Chirtsov of Russia had kill-death-assist ratios of 8-2-11 and 8-3-11, respectively, on the opening map before putting up identical 11-4-11 lines on the second.
PARIVISION cleaned up against Rune Eaters in 36 minutes on red and 31 minutes on green. Alan “Satanic” Gallyamov of Russia averaged a dominant 20.5-1.5-6.0 K-D-A for PARIVISION.
The Esports World Cup features competition in 25 titles and a $75 million prize pool. Other upcoming events include League of Legends, PUBG, EA Sports FC, Call of Duty: Warzone, Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, Rocket League, Counter-Strike 2 and Fortnite.
The tournament continues Friday with two more quarterfinal matches:
–Nigma Galaxy vs. BetBoom Team
–Team Falcons vs. Vici Gaming
Dota 2 Esports World Cup payouts (prize money, club points)
1. $750,000, 1,000 — TBD
2. $340,000, 750 — TBD
3. $200,000, 500 — TBD
4. $120,000, 300 — TBD
5-8. $70,000, 200 — Team Spirit, Rune Eaters, two teams TBD
9-12. $40,000, 0 — LGD Gaming, 1w, Team Liquid, Aurora Gaming
13-16. $20,000, 0 — MOUZ, Xtreme Gaming, Virtus.pro, PlayTime
17-20. $10,000, 0 — GamerLegion, Level UP, REKONIX, OG
21-24. $7,500, 0 — Poor Rangers, L1 Team, Team Nemesis, Inner Circle x Insanity
–Field Level Media
