Day One of the North America Qualifier of the Dota 2 The International 2019 is done and standing at the top is Forward Gaming. A total of eight teams are fighting it out to get that one spot for TI9. Four of the teams received invites, while the other four have to go through the open qualifiers.
Like the other qualifiers, the top four teams of the Group Stage move forward to the Playoffs. The current standing is:
- Forward Gaming: 5-0
- beastcoast: 4-1
- J.Storm: 3-1
- Black Sheep: 2-2
- Kookaburra: 2-2
- Complexity Gaming: 1-3
- Old Suck Gaming: 0-4
- Team Xolotl: 0-4
The first game of the NA Qualifier featured Forward Gaming against J.Storm. While the game lasted almost 50 minutes, it was Forward Gaming all the way. Foward Gaming's Quinn "CCnC" Callahan had the most kills on his Outworld Debourer at the end of the game with 12.
Forward Gaming's next game was against Black Sheep, and the results were the same as the first game. This time, however, it was Yawar "YawaR" Hassan who took the top spot with his Gyrocopter. Against Old Suck Gaming, it was pretty much the same. For this game, two Forward Gaming members racked up double digits in kills. Tawar earned 10 kills on Ember Spirit and Arif "MSS" Anwar scored 11 on his Phoenix.
Against Complexity Gaming, Forward Gaming again had no issues. Forward Gaming led from the start. Again the top kills were from Yawar and MSS. In addition, these two had no deaths during the entire game. In fact, even Jingjun "Sneyking" Wu managed to avoid any deaths. What makes this even more amazing is that Sneyking is in Forward Gaming on a trial basis. The final game for Forward Gaming was against Kookaburra.
Day Two has a total of 11 more games to be played. With two games left on its schedule, Forward Gaming is more than guaranteed a spot in the Playoffs. Considering the day one standings, it is likely that beastcoast will move to the Playoffs as well. J.Storm is currently in third and likely needs to win two of the remaining three games in order to increase its chances of going to the playoffs.
Matches for Day Two begin today at 2:00 p.m. EDT.
