The International is an annual DOTA 2 tournament hosted by Valve Corporation. 18 teams (16 teams 2011-2016) attend the tournament by direct invitation or by winning the regional qualifier. The First edition of TI took place in Cologne, Germany at 2011 with a total prize pool of $1.6 million. The 2nd TI took place in Seattle with the same $1.6 million prize pool. The third TI took place again at Seattle and the same year Valve introduced The Compendium, which everyone can purchase to follow the event and get insights on the event while it has other interactive part including a part of the profit from the compendium adding to the total prize pool of the tournament.
With the help of the compendium TI reached $2.8 million prize pool. The 4th International, held at Key arena, Seattle. TI4 made history by having one of the largest prize pool in the history of E-sports, $11 million. The 5th International took place in 2015 with a prize pool of over $18 million with that making the new record of holding the largest prize pool for one tournament. Ti6 at Key arena, Seattle again broke all the records by having the highest prize pool of $20,770,460 just to hold the record for a year as TI7 in 2017 reached the Prize pool of $24,787,916.
The International 2018 will be held at the Rogers Arena, Vancouver, Canada. The group stage starts from August 15th to August 18th and main event kicks off on August 20th to August 25th. 18 teams from all over world are selected through open qualifier (June14th – June 17th), Regional Qualifier (June 18th – June 25th) and a series of featured tournaments from October 2017 to June 2018 known as DOTA Pro Circuit, which awards players and teams qualifying points and the Top 8 teams with highest DPC point gets direct invitation to the TI8.
