The USA can claim that it has joined the annals of nations that have won The International Dota 2 Championships. The American team Evil Geniuses has won the fifth Dota 2 International Championship, bagging the $6.6 million first prize out of the tournament’s overall $18,416,970 prize pool.
This was the largest prize money in all of eSports ever. This also means that all five players who competed for Evil Geniuses—Fear, PPD, Aui, Sumail, and Universe—are now millionaires.
With this win, it places all five members of Evil Geniuses in the top ten of highest earning professional eSports competitors in history. Suma1L, at 16, is the youngest Dota 2 world champion of all time and currently ranking 6th in all-time winnings with $1,637,048.02 in total prizes won since starting his career in late 2014. Fear, one of the players followed in the Valve documentary Free to Play, won his first world championship in the professional DotA scene almost a decade since he debuted.
The Evil Geniuses won the championship in Seattle on Saturday over Chinese team CDEC 3-1 in a best-of-five series. CDEC takes home the second place trophy and a not-too-shabby purse of $2.8 million. CDEC is a relatively unknown team from China, a region that has produced former world champion teams such as Invictus Gaming and NewBee.
Last year’s winner, Newbee, was the first team eliminated from TI5. Following the elimination of Invictus Gaming and Na’vi, it was guaranteed we’d see a new Dota 2 champ in 2015.
The Dota 2 International 2015 is an eSports Dota 2 event sponsored by Dota developer Valve Corporation, with a reported total prize pool of over $18 million, the biggest prize pool ever collected for the Dota 2 International event since it launched in 2011. A portion of the prize pool is put together by 25 percent of the proceeds from Dota 2 purchases, which says a lot about the popularity of Dota 2 exponentially increasing over the years.
The Dota 2 International 2015 was held from August 3 to 8, with a starting pool of 18 teams. The teams were pitted against each other throughout the competition until two of the teams are left to compete for the Dota 2 grand finals. One hundred seventy-six Dota 2 matches later, Evil Geniuses were able to arrive at the top of the Dota 2 championship with the last game versus CDEC running for almost one hour.
Team Evil Geniuses’ name has been in use in competitive gaming since the 1990s. The company was originally founded in Canada with one team, a “Counter-Strike” competitive team, and later relocated to San Francisco.
