The Dota 2 OMEGA League is well underway with four different divisions. The top tier of these is the Europe Immortal Division, which offers a prize pool of $500,000. The Group Stage is divided over three weekends in August, with the Playoffs slated to begin in September,
For this Division, OG fans are probably loving the fact that the team is once again showing everyone why they are the two-time TI champions. Despite having played only two games so far, OG had some interesting strategies that resulted in excellent matches. In addition, the team was also playing with a relatively new roster composed of Yeik “MidOne” Nai Zheng, Topias “Topson” Taavitsainen, Sébastien “Ceb” Debs, Martin “Saksa” Sazdov, and Joan “N0tail” Sundstein.
OG’s first match was against Vikin.gg, and in the first game OG was trounced. In the second game OG went for the IO carry with MidOne. With Ceb on a Dark Seer, this resulted in a really powerful Troll Warlord for Topson. In the third and deciding game, OG again went for the IO, but this time as a support. It was a rather quick win for OG with Topson’s Tiny and Ceb’s Windranger both having no deaths.
The next match was versus Ninjas in Pyjamas. OG went for a Tidehunter mid for Topson. While this may appear to be a problem considering how slow the hero moves, this was more than balanced out with the IO pick for MidOne and Dark Seer for Ceb. Can you imagine a behemoth running towards you? For the second game, NiP continued to have difficulty. This time, the difficulty was against Topson’s Gyrocopter.
Overall, it was surprising to see OG manage to pick IO for all five of its games.
This Division also marks the official debut of Evil Geniuses in the Europe scene. This was not really a problem since some of the team’s players are from Europe. In addition, Danil “gpk” Skutin of Gambit Esports is standing in for Abed “Abed” Yusop given that the latter is still in the Philippines due to quarantine measures, and faced high ping issues. Aside from gpk, the roster was composed of Artour “artezzy” Babaev, Roman “RAMZES666” Kushnarev, Andreas “Cr1t-“ Nielsen, and Tal “Fly” Aizik.
So, how did the team’s first match in Europe go? Well, it was against 5men and EG more than dominated both games. In the first game, gpk and Cr1t- had double digit kills. Meanwhile, in the second game gpk again managed to get double digit kills with Tiny.
Here are the current results of the Europe Immortal Division:
- Group A
- Evil Geniuses: 1-0
- Team Nigma: 1-0
- Alliance: 1-1
- 5men: 1-1
- Virtus.pro: 1-1
- Natus Vincere: 0-2
- Group B
- OG: 2-0
- Team Secret: 1-0
- Vikin.gg: 1-1
- FlyToMoon: 0-0
- Team Liquid: 0-1
- Ninjas in Pyjamas: 0-1
The next set of matches will be held from August 20 to August 23.
