The International 2014 (TI4) has been full of surprises and the latest surprise will be directly impacting the players, as Valve announced that this year’s International will be following a new format.
In the previous Internationals, all participating teams were divided into groups with a best-of-one round robin format. The top half of the teams per group will head to the upper bracket of the main event while the rest of the teams fall to the lower bracket. With this format, no team gets eliminated in the group stages, but that’s about to change this year.
Introducing the new format
There will be 19 teams flying to Seattle with 15 seeded teams (11 invited and four qualifier winners) and four teams to participate in phase one of the of the play-offs, which is the play-in series (previously known as the Wild Card match). The winner of the play-in series will be the final team to complete the 16 teams for TI4.
For the second phase, all 16 teams will be placed in a single group where they will compete in best-of-one matches in a round robin format over a course of four days. The top two teams will automatically advance to the upper bracket of the main event while only the following eight teams will then proceed to phase three. The remaining six teams will be eliminated from the tournament.
Two days will be dedicated for the third and final phase of the play-offs with one bracket played for each day using the following format:
The six teams from phase three will join the top two teams from phase two and move on to the main event, which will have the following format:
You can find the official tournament format announcement here.
What does this mean?
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