SL i-League StarSeries Season 3 preview

8 teams will take part in the tournament. 2 teams received invites from the organizers, 2 pairs of teams passed through the Chinese and the European qualifications. The last two teams are the representatives of the Southeast Asian and American regions.

OG - direct inviteWings Gaming - direct inviteTNC Pro Team - the SEA qualifications winnerTeam Secret - the European qualifications winnerTeam Liquid - the winner of qualificationsiG Vitality - the winner of qualificationsTeam VG.J - the winner of qualificationsDigital Chaos - the American qualifications winner

The venue will be Shanghai International Gymnastic Center, which is a basketball arena for 4 000 viewers, but recently the artistic gymnastics events are carried more often. Let’s see, how organizers will reorganize arena for the eSports tournament.

The format of LAN is next:

The group stage will be played in GSL format. In the first round, the organizers randomly seeded participants into pairs. After the first games, the teams will move to the Double Elimination bracket to determine 2 best teams in each group. These teams will pass to the play-off stage. The format of all matches of the group stage is best-of-three (bo3).The organizers decided to introduce the play-off stage to Single Elimination bracket starting from the semi finals. The format of play-off matches of semifinals is best-of-three (bo3) and format of Grand Final match is best-of-five (bo5).

The divide between groups:

Talent list:

David «GoDz» ParkerJorien «Sheever» van der HeijdeOwen «ODPixel» DaviesBen «Merlini» WuIoannis «Fogged» LoucasGabriel «Lyrical» CruzJake «SirActionSlacks» KannerChan «WinteR» Litt Binn WinteR

We have taken a comment of Andrew «Zyori» Campbell - managing director of MoonDuck TV:

«Probably I will go for my top 2 will be Digital Chaos and OG. Also home court of Wings, possible they can make a good run in this tournament.»

One of the questions, which will be answered by this championship, is the invites to The Kiev Major. The tournament is the last LAN chance for teams to prove Valve that they are worthy of the invite. Likely Wings, DC and OG should not care about this because their tournament invitation makes no doubt, but it is unknown, what will happen if someone from this trio doesn’t get to the playoffs. The invite of TNC is in doubt, but if the team gets at least to the final, they will have the big chances for the Major invite. The last 4 teams will have to win the tournament to make their chances for the invite to the Kiev Major bigger. So all teams have to make everything they can!

The European viewers will definitely concentrate on the representatives of their region - Team Liquid and Team Secret. The case is that Liquid played at the LAN last time at the end of November when they won the 6th season of the DreamLeague. After that, they played only online tournaments, but at the beginning of February they won qualifications to SL i-League and Dota 2 Asia Championship 2017, so everyone expects their good game. In their turn Team Secret last time took part in the LAN tournament in Split, Croatia at the DotaPit Season 5, where they, to choose my words carefully, they performed not in the best way and held the 5-6 place. So this tournament will be a great opportunity to show yourself before The Kiev Major.

A lot of people surely will focus on the carrying of the championship, because not the best tournaments are carried in China. One of the most successful championships, which were in China is January WESG World Finals and MarsTV Dota 2 League 2016 Autumn. The organizers will have to try if they want the championship to pass without delays and the content and streams to be at a good level.

The schedule, stream and other information you can find in our reportage and follow the tournament with the Upcoming Matches, where the editors of the website will write their forecasts for the most part of the matches.