DOTA 2 News: Team Reckoning on qualifying for SEA 2019, their victories and preparation.

Team Reckoning receiving their trophy (Image courtesy: Thet Ko Aung @Artcircle Photography)
Team Reckoning receiving their trophy (Image courtesy: Thet Ko Aung @Artcircle Photography)

Reckoning Esports which has all Myanmar players in the rosterunder the banner of Indian organization, Yuvin Esports has recently qualified to play DOTA 2 for Southeast Asian Open 2019 in the finals. Our team at Sportskeeda got in touch with the team and had them answer a few questions.

Q1) About Myanmar Qualifiers, tournament details.

As you may be aware that esports will be featured as a medal sport at the 2019 Southeast Asian Games (SEA 2019) in the Philippines from December 1 to 6, 2019. It will be the first time that esports will be contested as a medal event in a multi-sport competition sanctioned by the International Olympic Committee after it featured as a demonstration sport in the 2018 Asian Games in Jakarta, Indonesia. The credit of esports' inclusion in the Southeast Asian Games goes to relentless efforts by Min-Liang Tan, CEO of Razer.

SEA Games is a biennial multi-sport event involving participants from the current 11 countries of Southeast Asia. Each country had qualifying tournaments to select country qualifier for various games. There were 104 teams registered for DOTA2 game and went through multiple rounds of qualifying matches since first week of June 2019. The semifinal round had 8 teams competing against each other. Our team, Reckoning Esports was at top of the leaderboard with 12-2 win.

Q2) How is the competitiveness in the Myanmar region/circuit?

Myanmar has much larger active esports fan base than in India, may be multiple times (excluding PUBGM in India). There were 438 teams registered at Myanmar Electronic Sports League which conducted qualifying matches for SEA Games 2019. Out of this 438 teams, 104 were for DOTA2, 318 teams for Mobile Legends Bang Bang (MLBB) and 16 for Arena of Valor (AOV) games. There does not seem to be any following for FPS games like CSGO.

Q3) Round wise explanation on Reckoning Esports' victories (if possible)

Since we were ranked first during the group stage we were directly placed in the upper bracket and we face off against the ranked 2 team Outworld Esports , we beat them in a convincing fashion with a scoreline of 2-0 and got qualified for the finals which was a Best of five games against the winner of Lower bracket finals.

In lower bracket 3rd and 4th ranked team Yangon Galacticos and Kingpanda Gaming respectively faced off each other with Kingpanda coming out on top with a scoreline of 2-1 and then King Panda faced off against Outworld Esports and beat them convincingly with a 2-0 win and were the finalists against us.

In the finals b05 we showed them the true viciousness of Reckoning Esports as we beat them 3-0 without breaking a sweat and made sure that all the victories were without any hiccups and clean. With this victory we made a statement that we are the number one team in Myanmar.

Q4) Brief on the buildup to the finals

We were pretty confident about taking this home but we made sure that we were not overconfident we gave the opponents enough respect while drafting the heros that we were gonna play in the finals since they were a deserving finalist but inside the game we made sure there is no mercy.

Q5) Teams feeling after winning the finals?

Surreal and amazing are some words which might ineffectively describe our feelings because its indescribable , we were all in all feeling so proud that we might be representing the Myanmar Flag as an Indian Org on an international stage. For the players it was utmost elation on doing something so amazing and finally getting a validation on what they truly love doing.

Q6) What are the preparation gonna be like for the SEA Games? Is the team going to come back to India and practice?

The team is gonna wait for another national tournament thats lined up is WESG Myanmar Qualifiers during September first week and gonna be practicing here and will be coming back to India after the Qualifiers get over. The bootcamp will be for period of atleast 6-7 months.

Our Main aim is to qualify for the TI 10 and bring pride and respect of two countries i.e Myanmar and India !

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