Team Liquid highlights week of Dota 2 tournament

Thousands of gamers filled the Seattle Center and Key Arena last week as The International 7 took over much of Lower Queen Anne for the Dota 2 World Championships.

The tournament featured players from Europe, North America, Asia and the Middle East, with European squad Team Liquid winning the championship pot of $10,806,301 after sweeping Chinese team Newbee.

Dota 2 is a free-to-play multiplayer online battle arena created by Bellevue-based Valve Corp. The International, in its seventh year, is the largest competitive gaming tournament in the world.

“This is the Super Bowl of Dota 2,” said Mike Stuart, who came from Calgary to watch the weeklong tournament. “People are here from all over the planet.”

The game consists of two teams of five players “drafting” a hero from a 108-strong set of radiant champions. Dota, which is sometimes stylized as DOTA, stands for Defense of the Ancients. The original game debuted in 2003 as part of Blizzard Entertainment’s Warcraft series. Valve purchased the rights to the series and created Dota 2 in 2013.

The team’s heroes then attempt to destroy the other side’s towers and base. It’s kind of like capture the flag mixed with chess, mixed with Lord of the Rings. Each hero has a different move set and can behave differently in the arena around other heroes, meaning there is a near limitless amount of creativity and strategy involved in taking the other base.

The week featured the world’s 16 best teams compete, get placed into brackets and face off on Key Arena’s main stage. Team Liquid fought its way up from the losers bracket to win the tournament. More than $23 million was on the table at the event.

Many spectators of the world’s number one “eSport” traveled to Seattle from another country, and a significant number were rooting for a certain nationality rather than a certain team.

One woman, who declined to give her name, said Team Liquid was one of the last shots for a “western” team to place well in the preliminary days of the International event.

Teams LGD Forever Young, Virtus.pro, Invictus Gaming and several others all hailed from China and Russia, and the decidedly North American crowd had a distinct cheering bias. After Team Liquid, the next four teams were from China. The first American team, Digital Chaos, finished ninth in the tournament.

The prize pool for the tournament is funded by in-game purchases players make. A quarter of all purchases in a certain time period went toward the pool. The last-place teams in the tournament walked away with $61,000 and the top six teams left with more than $1 million.

Previous iterations of The International took place in Cologne, Germany and in Seattle’s Benaroya Hall before moving to Key Arena and Seattle Center in 2014. Valve announced a Dota-themed trading card game during the tournament.