Dota 2’s The International 2012: everything you need to know for day one

Are you watching The International this weekend? I think you should, because at the very least it gives you something to do instead of complaining about the continued lack of Half-Life 3. Dota 2 can be a daunting experience, even if you’re a regular player, but this multi-million dollar tournament is shaping up to be an incredible gaming event that looks set to be worth everyone’s attention. VideoGamer.com will be providing daily updates detailing the highs and lows of the three-day event, but here’s everything you need to know before the main tournament begins today at 09:30 PDT/17:30 BST.

The International takes the world’s sixteen best Dota 2 teams and has them compete in Seattle’s Benaroya Hall across three days for a chance to win a staggering $1,000,000 grand prize. The best-of-five Championship Final will take place on Sunday, but on Friday and Saturday the sixteen teams will be whittled down to two over the course of 21 matches.

Each game will be streamed live with commentary on the International 2012 site, but the best way to watch is through the spectator mode of the Dota 2 client itself. Valve has released this for free, so all you need is five-ish gigs of hard drive space and a Steam account.

Last weekend the sixteen teams played 14 matches each as part of a group preliminary stage, with the most successful half going into The Winners’ Bracket this weekend. The rest of the teams will start in The Losers’ Bracket.

The International is a double-elimination tournament, an initially confusing but popular way of running competitive gaming tournaments. Both the Winners’ and Losers’ Bracket run simultaneously, with teams in The Winners’ Bracket playing best-of-three rounds. The losing team is relegated to The Losers’ Bracket, meaning teams who start in the Winners’ Bracket are required to lose twice before being eliminated from the tournament.

Today’s matches will kick off by having Chinese favourites LGD square off against Orange in a best-of-three Winners’ Bracket opening round. LGD, who are expected to win, stormed the group stage preliminaries earlier this week with an unbroken 14 win streak in Group A, but Orange also performed respectably in Group B with 8 wins. The possibility for an Orange victory is slim but it does exist, and such a result would certainly add a bit of early drama to the proceedings.

The next Winners’ Bracket match will be the USA’s CompLexity Gaming facing off against Singapore’s Zenith. Zenith are widely regarded as the better team here, but the comparatively inexperienced CompLexity were certainly strong in the group stages. Then China’s Invictus Gaming, who finished top of Group B in the preliminaries, will take on the US-based Evil Geniuses. This match will almost certainly go in favour of iG; many believe Sunday’s Championship Final will be between LGD and iG.

The final Winners’ Bracket match of the day will have another Chinese team, DK, play against last year’s International winners Na’Vi. Na’Vi are the perhaps the most popular Dota 2 team in the world, although the Ukranian team had a decent but unremarkable start in the group stages.

Over in the Losers’ Bracket, today’s best-of-one matches see popular Swedish team CLG compete against mTw, under-performing mouz play last year’s runner’s up EHOME, TongFu take on Moscow 5 and Darer square off against Australia’s Absolute Legends. Each team will be fighting to stay in the tournament; the loser of each game will be eliminated today, with the victorious team staying on to compete tomorrow against one of the losing teams from today’s Winners’ Bracket events.

But what’s the general feeling of the show? While the Asian teams seem to be unstoppable when it comes to micro-management and straight laning, there’s a deep-seated belief that the Americans and Europeans will deploy some off-the-cuff strategy to confuse and bedazzle the Asian teams. Maybe it’s wishful thinking, but who wouldn’t love to see CLG, Na’Vi or mTw pull something insane out of the bag and shake up the entire tournament?

That said, my money is quite literally on LGD.

As for some other general stats, the top 5 champions used so far are Venomancer, Leshrac, Invoker, Rubick and Morphling, and it’s a pretty safe bet that we’ll see all of those pop up a few times tonight. On the other hand, the 5 most banned champions at The International are Naga Siren, Lycanthrope, Dark Seer, Broodmother and Nature’s Prophet. If you’re still getting to grips with the game and you’ve got some free time this afternoon, it might be a good idea to play a few games with them to see why they’re so popular and/or feared.

Day one of The International 2012 starts at 09:30 PDT/17:30 BST.