Team Newbee is your TI4 champion

The International 2014 (TI4) Aegis has been claimed.

Team Newbee emerged victorious over Vici Gaming (VG) with a 3-1 win in a clash of the East on the grandest Dota 2 stage. This is the first time that two Asian teams have met in the grand finals of any International.

VG had an amazing run from the beginning of the tournament. Its dominance started from day one of the group stages where they emerged as the top team with 12-3 record, effectively landing a spot in the upper bracket grand finals.

(See: TI4: VG unshakable, Alliance on the brink of elimination)

Newbee, on the other hand, took a more difficult route and fought its way through the bubble bracket where it defeated SEA’s pride Team Titan, former International champions Natus Vincere (Na’Vi), and Invictus Gaming (iG). This win allowed Newbee to later meet VG in the main event upper bracket with the former winning 3-1 over the latter.

This year’s International prize pool of $10,931,105 currently holds the record for the biggest prize pool for a single eSports event in history. It is almost four times than the previous International’s prize pool of $2,874,380. Newbee will receive a cash prize of $5,028,308 while VG will get $1,475,699. Check out the prize distribution:

This was made possible by the Dota 2 community’s effort to add to the prize pool by purchasing and levelling TI4 Compendiums. Every $9.99 purchase of the Compendium contributed $2.50 to the base prize pool of $1.6 million.

So what’s next? If we follow the trend from previous Internationals, the scene will be fairly quiet with the main teams going a temporary hiatus to recover from the International burn out. This is the calm before the storm because what follows will most probably be the post-International shuffle. This will be the season for teams disband and reform, and for players to return and retire. As they say, the road to the next International begins where the road to the current International ends.

A peek of what happens post-TI4