PARIVISION and XG escape elimination at ESL One Birmingham 2026

The group stage at ESL One Birmingham 2026 is now behind us and the teams playing at the event, something that both PARIVISION and Xtreme Gaming will be quite thankful for.

These two squads nearly didn’t make it out of the preliminaries, as both of them finished with a less than 50 percent win rate in terms of maps.

Step by step

I have to commend PARIVISION for not capitulating after their abysmal start to the 2025-2026 season. They looked terrible in the first few months of the year, something that I personally did not expect given their great performance at The International 2025 (TI14) and their commitment to keeping that squad together for the foreseeable future.

Since then, they’ve let go of Dmitry “DM” Dorokhin at the offlane position, and replaced him with Valery “SSS” Lazarev. Initially, I expected this move to set them back even further, but SSS has acclimated to his new home as a pro player better than I thought he would in such a (relatively) short span of time. He hasn’t been the dead weight that I thought he’d be for a while, which is great news for this team’s efforts at getting back to the top of the competitive scene.

It started with their sixth place finish at DreamLeague Season 28, which at the time I thought was way below what should have been the expected result for them. But in hindsight, they needed to work their way up after acquiring SSS; it would have been completely unreasonable to expect more. And while they did regress at PGL Wallachia Season 7 following DreamLeague, they at least didn’t totally bomb out in last place or close to it.

They’re looking better than they did previously with SSS in tow. They remind me somewhat of Team Liquid’s predicament earlier this year, when they similarly had to contend with Marcus “Ace” Christensen and Erik “tOfu” Engel as new pickups. They also struggled a lot to start the season, but have since bounced back in a big way. PARIVISION are on a similar trajectory now, though it will still take a lot for them to break past the top 6 at ESL One Birmingham. Not dropping their tiebreaker game versus BetBoom Team today is a good sign, but we’ll have to see just how far they can actually go from here.

Xtreme-ly stubborn

There’s something about Xtreme Gaming that makes them hard to get rid of this year. On paper, they really should be a team that rarely ever makes it into the top eight spots of any tier 1 tournament — but they’ve defied the odds fairly regularly since getting Cheng “NothingToSay” Jin Xiang and Xu “fy” Linsen in the post-TI14 roster shuffle.

They might have not done that well at PGL Wallachia Season 7 and BLAST Slam 5 and 6, but for a roster filled with aging, inconsistent veterans, they’ve been doing better this season than most probably expected. At ESL One Birmingham, they managed to stay afloat by getting important wins against lesser teams like paiN Gaming and Nigma Galaxy, even if those were mere 1-1 results. They did make up for their relative mediocrity with a 2-0 win against OG today, so there’s that.

Now, whether or not they can build on this surprise escape from the group stage is another question altogether. This team isn’t really built to make deep runs at top level tournaments, because Wang “Ame” Chunyu is bound to choke at some point in the playoffs. But with an entirely new metagame coming into the home stretch thanks to the new Dota patch, there’s a window for him and XG to upset the natural order.