Feels good to be back in Kiev and this time it’s for the WESG European qualifier/playoff. We are here to represent Sweden since we won the Swedish qualifier, hopefully we will manage to make it to the final playoff in China later this year as well! There are 20 teams here from Europe who are fighting for 8 slots. There is a group stage here first at the tournament with 5 teams in each group where 3 teams proceed to the playoff. I’ve updated the “Upcoming games” tab if you are interested about when we are playing. There are a lot of games being played at the same time so I think the only main-stream and main-stage game we have is the one vs. F5 on Friday at 13:45 CEST.
WESG have other games as well like CS:GO, Hearthstone and Starcraft II so there will be a lot of European players, casters and personalities here. It’s always fun when the events have multiple games so you get to see people from the other games as well.
I’ll make sure to take some pictures tomorrow at the venue to post here. Until then I can only offer a picture of Midas when he was chilling in my lap while I was playing Dota just before I left for WESG! 😀
Played the Swedish qualifier in WESG (World Electronic Sports Games) last weekend. There are tournaments in both CS:GO, DOTA2, SC2 and Hearthstone and they have qualifiers in each country that participates to determine which teams and players that get to represent their country. I played the qualifier together with Limmp, Pablo, Solitude and s4 but we participated mostly for fun since for example s4 already is playing with OG (but can’t participate in this particular tournament with them because they all aren’t from the same country). We faced Loda’s and EGM’s team in the finals (they played together with m’ICKe, Jonassomfan and Handsken) and managed to win 2-1! They took the first game but we came back and won the last two.
The names are a bit weird because there wasn’t any ingame ticket so we all had to change manually.
First game was quite one-sided for them after the first 15 minutes. We tried to engage and fight them too much early on and when you look at their heroes you can tell it’s exactly what they wanted to do as well. It wasn’t something we thought of during the game and the outcome showed that as well ^^.
I think our draft was quite good this game. Their first three picks were Mirana, Sandking and Venge which all are spellcasters that don’t really want to get an early BKB. We decided to pick Silencer after that (s4’s idea) which made us win a lot of early engagements and take control of the game. Batrider could blink and lasso one target at the same time that we used global silence and then we could force towers 5vs4 or chase to get more kills if that was possible. We could also siege with SD’s disruption without being scared of getting into a bad position.
Last game was quite crazy and very back and forth! We took an early side of barracks but after that they won a couple of fights and got aegis on storm which made it hard for us to keep on taking more sides. We got the first side right before the 20 minute mark but didn’t manage to get the second one until like minute 42. I think they picked and played quite smart by having Beast and Storm on the team. You never want to fight Huskar straight on, you want to find the healers and other weak heroes in the back and go on them first. So by having Beastmaster’s hawk they could easily scout me and then just jump me with Storm. I tried to hide the best as I could but as you can see on my deaths it was easier said than done.. 😀
Went to both GG Bar and Kappa Bar here in Gothenburg last week. GG Bar holds a quiz every Monday and Wednesday which is a lot of fun depending on the theme of the questions, last time it was Nintendo 64 and Playstation 1 and I really loved Nintendo 64!
Started to pack down some things in the apartment yesterday. Me and Bummi bought a new one some months ago and we’re getting the keys October 3rd so it’s time to start preparing! 🙂
A very long time since I last wrote something but I haven’t found the time or felt like it since we started to bootcamp around a month ago. My mind has pretty much just been on TI until now.
Posting this now so you guys have something to read while you are waiting for some great games to be played tomorrow! 🙂
One of the pictures from the photo booth session (taken from @StarvingGamer1).
Before TI we bootcamped for around two weeks in Sweden. We rented a house that was big enough for us all to be able to stay there so it was nice and good to live together to discuss strategies or just hang out in the evenings. EGM told us about the Ursa + WD Roshan strategy that we later on used against Navi and we found out another trick as well that we actually didn’t get to use because there wasn’t any game that it suited so at least we have that left for the future ^^.
Played a bit of Dragon’s Lair for the NES during the flight to Seattle. The game is so bad and good at the same time :D.
Moving forward to TI it felt great to be able to go there again. Last year when we didn’t make it through the qualifier was rough, it’s hard to sit at home watching everyone else compete when you want to and have really tried to be there. We stayed at a hotel in Bellevue – I really like that area in Seattle. It’s the forth time I’m staying there (TI2, TI3, TI4 and TI6) so I know the place quite well where there are places to eat, shopping mall, Starbucks etc. You recognize a lot of the staff from Valve that are working with the event, it’s great to be able to see them again as well! As usual the whole event was very good, really nothing to complain about as a player and from what I’ve seen on the streams everything has been very good there as well. I really like the segments with Purge, he is just the perfect guy for that kind of thing!
Signing some on the way back to the hotel after one of our games.
The group stage where we played in 2 groups instead of 4 (as it was during the Majors) was in my opinion a good decision. When there are 4 groups with 4 teams each there are more room for mistakes with seeding before the tournament and less games to prove that you deserve to be in the upper bracket. I was really happy when we managed to get into the top4 of our group since it’s the first big step in the tournament and can mean everything for a good placement. We spent the next 3 days to prepare for Ehome to see what we wanted to play against them, how they drafted, how they played and stuff like that. We managed to have a very good start against them in both games but failed to use it to our advantage when we went into the midgame. The second game against Fnatic where we had Naix, Puck, Enchantress, Prophet and Rubick felt very good in the early game as well but we probably gave away too much when we took a bad fight on the left side where I got grabbed by Batrider and some pickoffs after that. We had somewhat of a snowball lineup so we needed to be able to shut them down more then we did.
The dining area at the hotel.
Finishing “only” in the 9th-12th place is both an accomplishment and a failure at the same time. It’s a failure in the way that I hoped and thought we would do better and you obviously enter the tournament with the mindset to win but at the same time it’s an accomplishment itself to just have qualified and played at The International and to be able to say that you are one of the best teams in the world. The thoughts and feelings are split but in the end I’m trying to be happy and satisfied with what we managed to accomplish after not even qualify last year.
Me during the press-session. Everyone did a couple of interviews each.
If you guys have any questions you can ask them here and I’ll try to answer as many as possible! 🙂
Joakim Akterhall 