Which Team Will Climb The Dota 2 Summit 5 This Week In Esports Betting?

[toc]This week The Summit 5 kicked off in Los Angeles, featuring several of the top Dota 2 teams, many of whom will be in action in the forthcoming The International 2016 tournament with a now $17m+ prize pool available, making it the richest esports event in history.

The Summit 5 therefore serves as a very useful warm up event for many of these teams and with over $100,000 in prize money available, there’s still plenty of dollars available for this high quality field to battle it out over.

Following a series of four qualifiers, Digital Chaos, Wings Gaming, Virtus Pro and Fnatic all earned a place in LA for the offline finals, however Virtus.pro were barred from participating following a rules violation in the European Qualifier final, allowing Ad Finem to replace them and represent Europe in the event.

These teams joined the three Directly invited teams of OG, Natus Vincere and Team Liquid as well as FDL who qualified via a redemption vote.

The Summit 5 is organised into two knockout brackets with the Winner Bracket played to a conclusion first. The result of which will give us the name of one of the Grand Finalists.

As each team loses a match in this knockout tournament, they drop into the losers bracket and will play through this bracket, until just one team remains as the winners of the losers bracket, and they will go on to face the winners of the winners bracket in Sunday’s Grand Finals.

The action began earlier this week and proved that once again when it comes to esports betting, the bookmakers generally have it right.

OG were the hot favourites going into the event (as they are for the forthcoming The International 2016 at 2/1 with Bet365) and they have progressed into the Winner’s Final already having defeated FDL 2-0 in the quarter finals, before narrowly edging out Fnatic 2-1 in the semi final.

Who they will play is not yet known with Natus Vincere v Wings Gaming and Team Liquid v Ad Finem scheduled to battle it out today, with the semi final between the two winners of their quarter final match up also clashing later today. The winners bracket final between OG and the team that progresses from the four remaining teams takes place Friday.

Once that is completed, the losers bracket will start and will be played to a conclusion on Sunday 17^th July. Once this final has been completed, then the Grand Final between the two teams qualified will complete the tournament.

There is plenty of top quality esports betting across a number of markets on games taking place at The Summit event in LA with Bet365, including Match Winner bets, Match Handicap bets and a number of different bets pertaining to the map score, map winners and total number of maps.

Can anybody stop OG from claiming their fourth successive tournament victory and heading into The International as the hot favourites to win the event outright? Check out the live Twitch feed on Sunday 17^th July to find out.

DreamHack Valencia 2016 kicks off SCII and CS:GO tournaments

The multiple-esport DreamHack events have taken place across the world in recent times with events recently in Tours (France), Austin (Texas, United States) and Leipzig (Germany).

This weekend however the action heads to the beautiful city of Valencia in Spain where several esports tournaments will take place.

Of those we are going to focus on two, the StarCraft 2 event and also the Counter Strike: Global Offensive event, both of which will take place over the coming weekend.

StarCraft II – 2016 DreamHack Open

A total of 96 of the world’s best StarCraft II players will be heading to Valencia to participate in the two-stage 2016 DreamHack Open in what promises to be an exciting and open event featuring a number of the top players from around the globe.

There’s a top prize of $16,000 up for grabs, plus 1,000 WCS points for the winner, with half that prize money and 700 WCS points for the runner up.

The unseeded 64 competitors will be drawn into 16 groups of four, where they will face off against each other in best of three matches. The top two teams from each of the 16 groups will then qualify for a second group stage.

At this second group stage, the 24 seeded players plus eight qualifier winners are placed two into each of the 16 groups, with the qualifiers from the first stage also drawn into these groups. Once again, the players play off against each other in best of three games to decide the top two players in each group.

These players advance to the playoffs.

The playoffs see the 32 players battle it out in a straight knockout through to the final where the winner will be crowned. Matches are Best of Three until the quarter finals, where they become Best of Five through to the final.

With many high quality players already qualified for the event, it promises to be a big weekend for StarCraft 2 fans watching the action unfold in eastern Spain.

CS:GO – DreamHack Valencia 2016

The CS:GO event at Dream Hack Valencia may only be a minor event with a relatively small prize pool of €8,000, but it won’t be any less competitive. Starting on the 15^th July and running through to the 16^th, the event sees five invited teams, two online qualifiers plus a BYOC qualifier (as yet to be decided) competing in a direct knockout event.

Seven of the finalists are known and they are:

• Team Alientech
• gBots eSports Club
• K1ck eSports.es
• KIYF Logitech G
• Wololos
• Galatics E-Sports
• Team Genus

One more team will be added to that list following the completion of the BYOC Qualifier.

The Quarter Finals sees all teams compete in against each other with the winners progressing into the semi finals and onwards into the final for the winners. Unusually, there is a third place match that will decide which team gets the €1,200 third place price and which gets the €800 fourth place prize.

Image credit: Kondoruk / Shutterstock.com