Esports | Dota 2 | OG — The 3-2 Grand Final at Rogers Arena

On August 25, 2018, the last two teams at The International 2018 sat down inside Vancouver’s Rogers Arena with the Dota 2 world title decided by a first-to-three series. OG took the first game, PSG.LGD answered with the next two, and the arena’s best-of-five grand final reached an elimination game for OG.

Valve ran the eighth International as Dota 2’s publisher championship, with its main event staged at Rogers Arena from August 20 to 25. OG had not earned one of the season’s direct invitations; after rebuilding its lineup, the team entered through Europe’s open and regional qualifiers before advancing through the upper bracket.

OG fielded Anathan “ana” Pham, Topias “Topson” Taavitsainen, Sébastien “Ceb” Debs, Jesse “JerAx” Vainikka, and Johan “N0tail” Sundstein. PSG.LGD’s Wang “Ame” Chunyu, Lu “Somnus丶M” Yao, Yang “Chalice” Shenyi, Xu “fy” Linsen, and Yap “xNova” Jian Wei arrived from the lower bracket after OG had beaten them 2–1 in the upper-bracket final one day earlier.

The final used Dota 2’s PC/Steam tournament environment on gameplay version 7.19 and Captains Mode, in which each side drafts five unique heroes after a sequence of bans. A game ends when one team destroys the opposing Ancient, the central structure inside its base; each destroyed Ancient therefore counted as one game win in the series.

After PSG.LGD moved ahead 2–1, OG won the fourth game to stay alive and then took the fifth. The 3–2 result awarded OG its first Aegis of Champions and $11,190,158 from the crowdfunded prize pool, completing a path that had begun in open qualification rather than with a direct place at the event.

Rogers Arena is the correct pin because the deciding games were played there before a live audience, not online or at an organizer office. The venue at 800 Griffiths Way fixes this five-game reversal to a public, verifiable site in downtown Vancouver.

Primary sources: https://www.dota2.com/newsentry/2882822214138791905 ; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bv4CqIxqTMA ; https://www.dota2.com/patches/7.19

Independent match report: https://www.espn.com/esports/story/_/id/24475992/og-beats-psglgd-finals-international-8-win-aegis-champions-11-million

Tournament and roster record: https://liquipedia.net/dota2/The_International/2018

Venue record: https://rogersarena.com/contact-us/

Photo: “Rogers Arena (Vancouver)” by Quintin Soloviev, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rogers_Arena_(Vancouver).jpg