After missing out on the first four events of the Dota 2 Pro Circuit season, Chinese teams are now poised to take a title for themselves at the Perfect World Masters in Shanghai.
Yesterday, Newbee successfully fended off fellow Chinese squad LGD.Forever Young, as well as all-Polish unit Team Kinguin. That booked them a match against Vici Gaming in the winners’ finals.
Their series against LFY was a great example of how to recover from a seriously bad start. After scoring just nine kills to LFY’s 28 in game one, Newbee bounced back in the next two maps. In spite of being behind in kills yet again in game two, they simply laughed in the face of Du “Monet” Peng’s 15-4 Chaos Knight.
Song “Sccc” Chun played a fantastic Death Prophet, dealing almost 30,000 points of damage to LFY’s heroes in game two. His performance was supplemented by that of Zeng “Faith” Hongda on Oracle, healing his teammates for just under 11,000 damage.
Game three was when they put the hammer down on their Chinese comrades. Xu “Moogy” Han snowballed way out of control on Slark, posting a flawless 15-0 KD ratio. Not bad for someone who lost the lane handily to a Batrider and Sand King combo.
On the other side of the bracket, the series between Kinguin and CIS team Vega Squadron also went the full distance. The Poles drew first blood in the best-of-three match, on the backs of Natan “Exotic_Deer” Michalewicz’s Razor and Michał “Nisha” Jankowski’s Templar Assassin.
Nisha in particular farmed both heroes and creeps so well that he was able to purchase a Bloodthorn—the most expensive item in the game—in just 36 minutes.
Game two went the way of the Moscow-based Vega, thanks to an emphatic 10-0 performance by legendary Russian player Sergey “G” Bragin on Broodmother. He managed to snag an Orchid Malevolence in just 11 minutes. Given Kinguin’s somewhat spell-dependent draft, such a quick Orchid allowed G to be a very oppressive force on the map early on.
Kinguin, however, would have their revenge in the final game. Although it was a very close fight in terms of kills, the Polish team held a modest gold advantage throughout most of the game. It was Exotic_Deer’s Razor once again making the difference, though, with more than 39,000 damage to his name.
Sadly, they could not carry their momentum through the following round. Newbee swept them aside in two games, with the second map failing to even reach the 30 minute mark. Game two was a bloodbath, with 31 kills going the way of Newbee.
The first lower bracket games tomorrow will pit Mineski against CompLexity Gaming, and LFY against Vega Squadron. The respective winners of both series will meet either Team Secret or Kinguin in the next round.
