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Hello there Dota 2 fans! I am happy to announce that the Chinese Dota 2 Super Major! It will be one of the bigger majors this year with a much larger prize pool and also more DPC points for teams that will be looking to get an invite into the nearing The Internationals.
The tournament will start on June 2 and will end on June 10. It will feature a staggering $1.5 million prize pool and also a lot of DPC Circuit points at 2,250. The first place winner of this event will rack up half of those points, so this is one of the more coveted major battles for the teams that will be attending here. The tournament is set to place in the wonderful city of Shanghai, China and the venue will be the lovely Yuanshen Gymnasium.
In this article, we will provide full information regarding the competition and also Dota 2 Super Major betting predictions.
Tournament structure
The China Dota 2 Super Major will be featuring 16 of the best teams in the world. Ten of those squads will be taken from direct invites and the remaining six earned their way to the event through regional qualifiers.
The invited forces are the CIS teams Natus Vincere and Virtus Pro. North American forces such as Optic Gaming and the fresh lineup of Evil Geniuses. European squads such as Liquid and Secret. Chinese based crews such as Newbee, Vici Gaming, and VGJ Thunder. And last but not the least, the sole South East Asian squad of Mineski.
The remaining six squads will be taken from the winners of their regional qualifiers. These are PSG LGD from China, TNC Pro Team from South East Asia, VGJ Storm from North America, Infamous from South America, The Final Tribe from the European qualifier and then Spirit from the CIS region.
There will be a total of four groups that will separate the squads for their opening matches. The format for this tourney will be double elimination GSL brackets. This means that after the group matches, the top two squads from each group will occupy the Upper Brackets and the bottom crews will occupy the Lower Bracket.
Losers of the Upper Bracket will automatically get knocked down to Lower Brackets while Lower Bracket losers get knocked out of the tourney. All of the matches will be a Bo3 except the Grand Finals on the last day which will be a Bo5 format.
Roster changes
Prior to this tournament, however, there have been a lot of reshuffles to some teams with players moving in and out of the rotation. Prior to ESL Birmingham, Natus Vincere replaced LebronDota with velheor. This will be the first tournament that we see velheor play and I am very excited about what this new player can bring to the table.
Most of the reshuffles happened post ESL Birmingham however. Evil Geniuses lost Fear, who was one of the original members of the organization, way back in the Dota 1 days due to the dismal performance they had. Fear retired from the organization and they also let go of Misery due to the dismal first-round exit. However, they acquired s4 and Fly from OG. This means that they still have a very competitive team.
OG, however, withdrew from the tournament for being down 2 men. We were all thinking that we would never see the day where Fly and N0tail separate since they have been teammates way back during the Heroes of Newerth days with Fnatic.
With OG withdrawing, OpTic Gaming, who stunned everyone during Birmingham, gets a second chance for the coveted spot in The Internationals. They might be playing catch up against other squads, but with their recent performance, they do have a very large chance to rack up a lot of points for that coveted TI invite.
Dota 2 Super Major 2018 Betting Predictions
The Final Tribe 
Now on to the spotlight. I will be talking about squads that catch a lot of my attention. The first one is The Final Tribe. They are an all Swedish team and are seemingly newer to the scene. What is not new however are the names on their roster.
Most notable of all is Era, which was the teammate of N0tail and Fly in Fnatic from Heroes of Newerth and also on the first Dota 2 The Internationals. Other notable names in The Final Tribe are Jonassomfan and also Handsken, both of which are also Heroes of Newerth pros before Dota 2 started. They were very good technical players before and were in the 1900 to 2000 MMR range in HoN, which is equivalent to Divine in Dota 2.
I would like to see what these guys can do in the bigger stage, and I would also like to know if Handsken in particular still has his technical ability in playing heroes such as Chen or Visage, which are micro managed heroes.
OpTic Gaming 
Now, let’s talk about OpTic Gaming. Like I said earlier, they are given a second chance at chasing points due to OG forfeiting from the tourney. What I would like to see however is how far can they go this time due to the Super Major being a much larger tourney than the ESL one. During ESL, they never had to go through the bracket stages, which means the games they play are fewer in between.
What I would like to know is, can they handle the pressure of playing in a bigger tournament, or will they succumb to the rigors of the long matches and also the long waits if they happen to get seeded in the upper brackets.
Evil Geniuses 
Next on the line is the controversial Evil Geniuses roster change. They are in the spotlight for one reason, how will the core distribute responsibilities. We all know that the three cores for EG which is Arteezy, Suma1L, and s4 all made their careers by playing mid, or prefer mid when playing. Arteezy got known for his mid plays during the SADBOYS era, Suma1L during the TI 6 era and s4 during Alliance.
Aside from that, two of the cores are also knowledgeable in playing the off-lane. Those are s4 and Suma1L. Now, we are all wondering, will Arteezy still remain the main carry for EG, s4 goes mid and Suma1L off-lane? Or, s4 off-lane, Suma1L mid and Arteezy still core carry, or the other way around?
The possibilities are actually endless and when you think about it, EG is starting to look more like Team Secret, which is somewhat a super group. The abundance of talent that they currently have, will they be able to work together? Now that is the main question.
Virtus Pro 
The last one in my spotlight would be Virtus Pro. By far, they are one of the most dominant teams we have seen currently. They won the last 3 majors that they joined, which was Katowice in February, Bucharest in March and then Birmingham just recently.
We have seen them steamroll their competition like they were just playing in pubs due to sheer dominance. If you look at their past performance in ESL Birmingham, They have not lost a game once! Not even on any Bo3 series they had. They just decimated anyone they played against. That perfect run they had is very very scary.
Ramzes has been a very dominating carry recently, but the MVP goes to No[o]ne. He has been one of the more consistent mid players recently out of all the pro teams that are currently playing. I will predict that Virtus Pro will either take this tournament running or will be finishing in the top 4 for sure.
Thanks for reading and stay tuned for more previews – Dota 2 has a lot of great events coming up in the next few month and we plan to cover all of them! See you in the next article!
Good luck!
