Esports | Dota 2 | Alliance — The 3-2 Decider at Benaroya Hall

On Sunday evening, August 11, 2013, Alliance and Natus Vincere sat opposite each other on the stage at Benaroya Hall in downtown Seattle with The International 2013 tied at two games apiece. Valve’s official event pages identify the fifth contest as “Grand Championship 5/5,” while the archived match began at 03:27 UTC on August 12—still August 11 in Seattle.

Dota 2 places five players on each side, each controlling one hero while the team tries to destroy the opposing Ancient inside its fortified base. This final was best of five games, so the fifth map was not an extra tiebreaker: it was the last scheduled game and the first side to a third win took the championship.

Alliance’s active five were Gustav “s4” Magnusson, Henrik “AdmiralBulldog” Ahnberg, Jonathan “Loda” Berg, Joakim “Akke” Akterhall, and Jerry “EGM” Lundqvist. Opposite them, Natus Vincere fielded Clement “Puppey” Ivanov, Alexander “XBOCT” Dashkevich, Danil “Dendi” Ishutin, Hlib “Funn1k” Lipatnikov, and Kuro “KuroKy” Salehi Takhasomi; Valve’s tournament roster pages and the game-five scoreboard agree on all ten starters.

Alliance won the opening game, Na’Vi answered twice, and Alliance forced the decider by taking game four. In game five, Alliance used Nature’s Prophet and Io—heroes able to move rapidly across the map—to pressure multiple lanes, while s4’s Puck used Dream Coil to interrupt three Na’Vi teleport attempts during one retreat and later disrupted another return to base.

That sequence mattered because a Dota game ends when the Ancient falls, not when one team has more hero kills or gold. Alliance’s split pressure kept Na’Vi from defending every structure; after 43 minutes and 45 seconds, Alliance won the map and the series 3–2.

The event was organized and produced by Dota 2 developer Valve, making it a publisher-run world championship rather than a community tournament. The final ran on tournament PCs in the public Patch 6.78c window; the official replay is match 271145478, but no source discloses an event-only build or operating system, so neither is inferred here.

The victory awarded Alliance more than $1.4 million from a prize pool expanded by sales of Valve’s first Interactive Compendium. Benaroya Hall still fills the block between Second and Third avenues and Union and University streets, the same exact building shown in the contemporary venue record and in this later exterior photograph.

Sources: Valve official game-five record, https://www.dota2.com/international2013/game/48 ; Valve Alliance roster, https://www.dota2.com/international2013/players/alliance/ ; Valve Natus Vincere roster, https://www.dota2.com/international2013/players/navi/ ; Valve press release reproduced by Engadget, https://www.engadget.com/2013-08-12-alliance-wins-the-international-2013-dota-2-tournament-earns-ov.html ; Polygon result report, https://www.polygon.com/2013/8/12/4613114/alliance-wins-the-international-2013-dota-2-championship/ ; independent match record, https://classicdota.com/game/1/ ; Benaroya Hall directions, https://www.seattlesymphony.org/planyourvisit/directions .

Photo: Andrew A Smith, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons; photographed August 15, 2009, showing Benaroya Hall from Second Avenue and University Street, then cropped and resized for this cover.