MDL Chengdu Major: Day 3 Playoffs Recap

The third day of the MDL Chengdu Dota 2 major ended today, with two more teams being sent back home, leaving only eight more teams in the fray. The teams will be getting a break before playing in the main stage on Friday.

Lower Bracket Round 2

The first series of the day saw Fnatic locking horns with Invictus Gaming. With Fnatic winning the the first game in 22 minutes, on the back of an impressive performance by Nuengnara '23savage' Teeramahanon on the Gyrocopter with a 14/0/9 K/D/A, the home team had their backs against the wall. IG then came back in a dominating fashion and crushed Fnatic in the next two games to send the SEA squad back home, with their midlaner Zhou "Emo" Yi showing an amazing performance on Storm Spirit in Game 3.

The second elimination series of the day saw Beastcoast decimate the North American squad, Fighting Pandas, 2-0 to set up a match against IG. While South American teams have usually underperformed in major Dota 2 events, this Peruvian squad has shown the world that this is not the case now and augurs well for their region.

Upper Bracket Semi-finals

The first upper bracket game of the day saw TNC predator take on J. Storm, who were a team not many thought would go this deep in the tournament. While the North Americans did fight very hard and long, TNC were simply the better team as they were more tactically sound when compared to their opponents.

The last series of the day and probably the most expected also, saw in-form Vici Gaming take on Evil Geniuses. The first game saw Vici counterpick to the Alchemist lineup of EG and win successfully by shutting down the other cores and isolating the Alch in fights. The second game of the series was similar to the first, only that this time EG played for the late game and made a huge comeback at the end to deny VG victory and pushing the series to a decider.

The final game saw VG dominating EG early on in the game but the latter slowly came back in the mid game with some good fights giving fans expectations of an other comeback. VG quickly dashed any hopes of NA fans as they didn't commit any mistakes and sealed the game in an emphatic manner after 50 minutes of gameplay.

The tournament will continue on 22nd November with all the three matches on the day being lower bracket elimination. The matches will be held in the New International Convention & Exhibition Center, Chengdu century City, China. The matches can be caught live on Twitch and will start at 4 AM GMT.