Dota 2 Tournament 2015: American Contingent Wins International Tourney, Proves Playing Video Games Can Earn You Millions
Coming in to the DOTA 2 International Competition, a five-man team from the U.S. had only their video game skills and a little bit of hope with them. Coming out of the competition was a different story.
Evil Geniuses' week-long DOTA 2 marathon culminated in them winning the grand prize of the video game's most prestigious event over the weekend.
It marked a couple of first for the tournament. EG became the first American team to win the International tournament as well as the first team to receive the record-breaking pot money of $6.6 million.
According to Forbes, EG bested out Chinese team CDEC in a five match series, 3 to 1. CDEC had knocked EG into the loser's bracket earlier in the tournament yet the American team clawed their way back to the top to coincidentally face CDEC in the Championship round.
EG was still favored to win it all going in to the finals as Newbee, the winner of TI4, didn't last long in the competition. Previous winners Invictus Gaming and Nature Vincere were also eliminated quite early in TI5.
TI5's record-breaking prize pool amounted to over $18 million. The amount was a combination of contributions from DOTA 2's player community, the game's annual sales, online betting, and Valve's chip-in of $1.6 million, Mashable quantified.
The prize pool was then divided up for the event's major and minor winners. CDEC received $2.8 million as the runners-up while the largest piece of the pot went to EG worth $6.6 million.
Evil Geniuses members Fear, PPD, Aui, Sumail, and Universe took home $1.32 million each. DOTA 2 posted a picture of the winning quintet in its Twitter feed:
For his part, Hassan Syed aka Sumail became the youngest millionaire in eSport history at just 16 years old. The Pakistan-born professional gamer sold his bike at a young age to play and master DOTA. "He is no stranger to the competitive stage, helping EG secure first place and $1.2 million dollars at this year's Dota Asia Championships at the age of only 15... With this win under his belt, Suma1L is estimated to have earned $1.6 million dollars in his rookie year alone," Gamespot reported. TI5 organizers took to Twitter to thank everyone for this year's successful DOTA 2 event:
DOTA 2 is a multiplayer online battle arena, which pits two teams of five against one another in real time. Players choose a particular hero to direct with unique skills and abilities that they incur throughout the duration of the match. The game's objective is simple: destroy the enemy before they destroy you.
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