The second day of the playoffs stage of The International 2022 was full of exciting matches. There were two matches in the Upper Bracket, which ended with Dota 2 teams Tundra Esports and Team Aster heading to Round 2, where they’ll face each other. Their respective opponents, OG and Team Liquid, drop to the Lower Bracket and one loss away from elimination.
Battle of the West
The first match of the Upper Bracket was Tundra Esports versus OG. It's safe to say Tundra was confident heading to the match considering they chose OG over PSG.LGD. When the match eventually started, it showed.
In the first game, Tundra showed why they were one of the best teams in Western Europe. The team finished the game in about 24 minutes, the shortest in the playoffs so far. Oliver "skiter" Lepko on Slark had 10 kills. Meanwhile, Leon "Nine" Kirilin on Tusk contributed seven kills. What about OG? The team had a combined total of seven kills. That's how bad it was for OG.
The second game was pretty much the same, despite Tundra letting OG pick the heroes they wanted like Timbersaw and Primal Beast. In the end, it didn't matter with Skiter on Lifestealer, unstoppable at 17 kills.
A lot of fans in the Dota 2 community are also looking into the Tundra win as the "revenge" story for Wu "Sneyking" Jingjun. Back in TI8, Sneyking was part of VGJ.Storm and was dropped to the Lower Bracket after losing in the first round of the Upper Bracket. Then in TI9, Sneyking was a member of Newbee and the same situation happened. In both cases, it was OG that defeated Sneyking and his team.
Going Strong
As one of the two Chinese teams that made it to the Upper Bracket, there were a lot of expectations for Team Aster to succeed and they didn't disappoint.
In the first game, Aster went with Sniper for Du “Monet” Peng, and it was a good choice. Combined with Leshrac and Sven, it was more than enough. You add the Pangolier and the end result was just too much for Liquid. At the end of the game, Monet had a K/D/A of 15/1/11.
For the second game, Aster decided to play it a bit slow, which resulted in Liquid being forced to stay in the lanes. When Monet's Terrorblade got what it needed, Aster started to strike and didn't turn back. Monet had a K/D/A this time of 8/0/6.
Which of the two matches did you enjoy watching? You read more about Evil Geniuses being eliminated and what happened in the Lower Bracket here.
