Details about the format and the invited teams have been released by the organizers of the Dota 2 Champions League, with the first set of games to kick off on the 17th of October with Na`Vi going up against Team Liquid at 19:00 CEST, followed by Virtus.pro vs. Fnatic at 21:30 CEST.
For Group A, Alliance look to be the favourites going in, even after having showed some shaky efforts recently during the WePlay second groupstages. Their saving grace is that their group all have different issues. Evil Geniuses have yet to hit their stride, Fnatic have been inconsistent of late, Virtus.Pro recently decided to rebuild and Quantic are now not just dealing with an injury, but the unofficial addition of former mouz player Pascal 'paS' Lohmeier in place of retired Brian 'MaNia' Strandby. Group A is in fact so close that it's near impossible to predict the outcome with any greater certainty. Cautiosly, Fnatic and Evil Geniuses may be favoured due to their roster stability, while Virtus.Pro rebuilding process is unlikely to kick in before most fo the groupstage matches have been played out.
Group B looks a lot tougher judging by current form, as Na`Vi look to defend their presumptive top position in the group from both Speed Gaming and the currently strongest team in North America, Team Liquid. Additionally Team Dignitas has that Steven 'Korok' Ashworth factor which can take over games at a moments notice. Finally there's the utterly unproven new mouz lineup, who unfortunately are going to have an uphill battle if they are to make it through the group, especially given the three favourites strong form.
Format
All groupstage games will be best of three with the team first set up in the lobby having the right to pick the server. Points will be awarded individually per match, meaning that a 2-1 result split the total of 3 points 2-1 to the teams in question. Tiebreaker rules are explained below. As the above picture shows, the first place teams will move straight into the semi-finals, while the 2nd and 3rd placing teams will play their counterparts in order to determine who will advance to the next stage.
Tiebreaker rules for the competition:
2.5. The standings are defined by following exponents:
a) Amount of earned points
b) Result of personal match
c) Amount of victories
d) Difference between won and lost maps only between the participants of debatable situation2.6. In case of impossibility of determination the best teams of group stages, organizers can appoint additional tie-breaking matches, announcement about which will be published on the official site
Casters
The English caster for the event will be joinDOTA's Toby 'TobiWan' Dawson, while the games will be streamed in Russian by Na`Vi and Virtus.Pro's inhouse casters Ren 'VeRsuta' Zurabyan and Vladimir 'Maelstrom' Kuzminov. Due to their partnership with Dailymotion, all games will be streamed on this platform in addition to being availabe inside DotaTV.
Prizepool:
Notably the D2CL has also made public their plan for increasing the prizepool, with 25% of all DotaTV ticket sales being added to the prizepool. How this will be added to the prizepool is not clear from the rules nor the official communications.
1st Place - $25,000
2nd Place - $15,000
3rd Place - $7,000
4th Place - $3,000
Source: Dota 2 Champions League