The International 2018 Teams

The competition will feature 18 teams from across the globe in a new ranking system. Several championships have been held around the world, called Minors and Majors, where the teams received points according to their performances in those competitions. Then at the end of the circuit, eight teams with the best scores have received direct invitations to the competition. The other 10 places were up for grabs in regional qualifiers.

The invited teams are as follows:

• Pro — Commonwealth of Independent States
• LGD — China
• Team Liquid — Europe
• Team Secret — Europe
• Mineski Pro Team — Southeast Asia
• Vici Gaming — China
• Newbee — China
• Thunder — China OpTic Gaming — North America

Qualified Teams

After 11 days of competition in six regions and more than five thousand participants, we came across the ten teams that will meet the eight invited teams in Canada.

On the China side, Team Serenity and Invictus Gaming made it to TI, while Fnatic and TNC Predator made their way from South East Asia. With respect to South America, after much controversy, Pain Gaming is the team that qualified from the region.

The representative of the Commonwealth of Independent States will be Winstrike Team, from Russia. The side made a name for itself as it knocked out NatusVincere. On the North American side, VGJ.Storm, Evil Geniuses, and OpTic Gaming secured a flight to Vancouver.

Finally, in the European region, OG, champions of countless tournaments, will seek to strike in 2018 after a series of bad results.

Bots vs Humans

Elon Musk’s company, OpenAI, created bots with artificial intelligence for games against players in DotA 2. Microsoft founder, Bill Gates, said he followed the work and is excited about upcoming challenges.

#AI bots just beat humans at the video game Dota 2. That’s a big deal, because their victory required teamwork and collaboration – a huge milestone in advancing artificial intelligence. https://t.co/UqIUhh9xFc

— Bill Gates (@BillGates) June 26, 2018

DotA 2 was selected to play the bots because it is a complex and competitive game. The game requires you to have a lot of individual skills as well as coordination between the five players. Last year, Musk’s company had already tried a 1v1 with a victory to the bots. OpenAI engineers trained the robots for months for a two game series against an amateur team, where they defeated the best players in the presentation event. But now the challenge is bigger. The company wants to continue to upgrade the robots and are prepared to go against pro players in August.

Millions of Dollars on the Line

Apart from the exciting completion amongst the best teams in the world, and AI Bots vs humans match, the competition has a multi-million-dollar prize pool. At the moment of this writing, the prize pool is $21,729,504. This is an incredible amount and will only increase in the coming weeks. So, we have so much to look forward to at The International 2018.