Dota 2 at the Esports World Cup continues, with today being the first day of the elimination phase following the group stage. Four teams have now been knocked out of the tournament, making it just 12 squads left in the running for the $3 million prize pool.

Esports World Cup Dota 2: VP go winless, Yandex shatter expectations

Just happy to be here

Virtus.pro, who came out of the group stage with a 0-6 record, have officially gone winless with eight losses to their name. To be fair to offlaner Nikita “Daxak” Kuzmin, he took their elimination in stride, saying “it is what it is” in his interview with Jared “Nomad” Bajina, and that these things happen in any competitive pursuit.

Honestly, they looked like they were all smiles despite the fact that they just went 0-8 in one of the biggest tournaments of the entire season. Even though they’ll come away from the competition winning just $50,000 (just 1.6% of the prize pool), I suppose that the fact that they even made it to the Esports World Cup is cause for celebration.

After all, they had to go through Nigma Galaxy in the MESWA regional qualifiers to do so. Granted, the MESWA qualifiers literally just had four teams playing, so it wasn’t the most competitive qualifier for EWC. But still, beating a team that should be much better than them on paper was probably more than they ever expected to get anyway.

That said, this roster is probably not long for this world. There’s little doubt that they played awfully throughout this tournament, and Daxak was ready to admit as much during his exit interview. Sometimes the roster just doesn’t click or form any real chemistry. Sometimes there’s just a glaring lack of talent across the board. I don’t blame Daxak in particular for the fact that they didn’t win a single map in Riyadh, but he did allude to the possibility that this team’s future might be in jeopardy.

Yandex on the rise

Meanwhile, their fellow Eastern European club Team Yandex had the time of their lives playing their first elimination match. They cleanly swept Shopify Rebellion in what I would call a pretty big upset, even though both of these teams are towards the bottom of the power rankings going into this tournament.

This is something I definitely didn’t expect. Team Yandex are actually moving on to the second and final round of the gauntlet bracket, which could give them a chance to make it into the top 8.

Yandex TA2000 Esports World Cup
Copyright: Elliot Le Corre, ESL FACEIT Group/Esports World Cup Foundation

They showed an astounding amount of resilience in the first game, refusing to let their poor midgame performance get them down before the 40 minute mark had even arrived. Undeterred by the fact that they were running a carry Doom for Aybek “TA2000” Tokayev, and that they were way behind on top of that (think Alchemist when his team is behind), Yandex rallied in the late game to steal the first game in the series.

Clearly shell shocked by how they lost the first game, Shopify went on to completely collapse in the second map, getting only nine kills to Yandex’s 27 and losing in less than 35 minutes. Though TA2000 had the better record, it was actually Evgeniy “Noticed” Ignatenko that proved to be the key for Yandex in Game 2, with his offlane Primal Beast being the anchor they needed to seal the deal.

For a squad that managed to stay afloat in their group, which contained killers like Aurora and Tundra, making it past Shopify is a huge result for Team Yandex. I expected them to be one of the first teams to be eliminated, but here they are, with an opportunity to test themselves and learn against a team much better than they are.

That team, by the way, happens to be Gaimin Gladiators. The Gladiators are far above Shopify in terms of sheer talent, of course, so Yandex will have their work cut out for them tomorrow. As Brian “BSJ” Canavan said on the post-match panel, Gaimin will not throw games away as easily as Shopify did their first game, so Yandex will have to find a way to get an early lead instead of hoping for a chance at a late game comeback.

We’ll just have to see how well they fare against top tier competition.

Other matches

The rest of the first round went just as expected. Talon Esports put away HEROIC in two games, putting them in the second round against Tundra Esports. Xtreme Gaming kicked Execration to the curb in just as many games, and so they’ll be facing PARIVISION tomorrow. Not a series that I think they’ll have much of a chance in, especially since PARIVISION are the reigning ESL One champions.

Team Falcons managed to dodge abject embarrassment today, at the expense of Virtus.pro. They should win versus Navi tomorrow, but this is the one matchup where I’m very, very worried for them still. Falcons haven’t looked right since the event started, so it’s entirely possible for them to just trip over themselves against a team that they should dominate on paper.