China’s time has finally come—they are now guaranteed to win a Dota 2 Pro Circuit title in spite of a strong foreign presence at the Perfect World Masters.
Yesterday, LGD.Forever Young secured an all-China grand finals by defeating compLexity Gaming, the only remaining non-Chinese team in the competition. Although they were embarrassed in front of the hometown crowd in game one due to an overall poor performance (draft, lanes, and play), they bounced back in the next maps and crushed coL’s hopes of a top three finish.
Tue “Ah fu” Soon Chuan got his hands on his favorite hero Earth Spirit in game two, helping the two main cores Xie “Super” Junhao and Du “Monet” Peng clean up for a total of 19 kills between them. By the end of the game, the Chinese team was sitting on a gold lead to the tune of 15,000.
Game three was fairly close up until the mid game, particularly around the 32-minute mark when LFY broke it wide open with a three-for-five trade in their favor—followed by three more kills shortly after. This caused their net worth advantage of 3,000 to shoot up to 8,000, which ballooned to nearly 15,000 over the next 10 minutes. From there, coL simply couldn’t recover from their losses, and were forced to concede the match after 50 minutes.
Things were looking great for LFY going into the lower bracket finals, but the red hot Vici Gaming would have none of it. Despite losing to Newbee in the upper bracket, VG wasted no time dispatching the International 7 bronze medalists. In fact, their series took no more than 46 minutes or so, with the first game clocking in at just 18 minutes and 51 seconds.
Zhang “Paparazi” Chengjun was the star of the show against LFY, dying just two times in both VG victories. He has been an important piece of the puzzle for Vici Gaming since the start of the Pro Circuit season, and everything is pointing towards further improvement for this young gun.
Vici Gaming will get a rematch against Newbee in tomorrow’s grand finals—although it will be a best-of-five. It’s fairly clear that these two teams are the best in this particular event, which should make the grand finals a treat to watch. We think it’ll last for at least four games.
If you feel like staying up tonight, you can catch the grand finals on PGL’s official Twitch channel at 3am ET.
