Image courtesy of ESL
The CIS giants and reigning ESL One champions currently sitting at the top of the Dota Pro Circuit leaderboards are granted a direct invite to the highly anticipated Major in Birmingham.
Virtus.pro, after winning three of the four DPC Majors so far, have been given the chance of adding another Major trophy to their collection in the form of a direct invite to the eighth and second-to-last Major of the 2017-2018 season after the tournament organizers tweeted out the announcement earlier today.
The announcement is not a huge surprise, considering the team won their first and second Majors of the season at ESL One Hamburg and Katowice respectively. This was amidst their highly publicized and talked about roster swap, where they traded in Vladimir "RodjER" Nikogosyan in exchange of Ilya "Lil" Ilyuk. Since then, the team has looked even stronger, winning two Majors back-to-back and cementing themselves as the first team to secure a direct invite to The International 2018.
This will, of course, be the first Major held in the United Kingdom which has been met with a universally positive response from the Dota community and much hype. The event itself has broken records in regards to the number of ticket sales and the rate at which they were selling out. In fact, it forced ESL to declare multiple waves of ticket sales time and time again to accommodate for the overwhelming demand.
The 12 team tournament has a prize pool of 1$ Million and 1500 Pro Circuit points and is scheduled to begin on the 23rd of May.
