Team Zero make a bottom four early exit at TI 2024

headline picture credits: Valve

Team Zero’s Cinderella story at The International 2024 (TI 2024) was short-lived.

Day 2 in the playoffs stage at TI 2024 is all about eliminations as four teams will see their dream crushed. After Talon Esports were the first to exit the tournament, Team Zero followed them after falling short against 1win.

Team Zero delivered the big surprise in the group stage by taking a clean 2:0 over BetBoom Team and scoring a draw result with Team Falcons. However, moving into the decider series, they were sent to the lower bracket rounds by Aurora. The playoff opener pitted them against 1win, who despite their team tag, were with zero victories in Copenhagen.

1winvsTeam Zero

Both teams went for hot meta carry picks in the opening game of the best-of-three series. Team Zero had Mirana on their side while 1win secured a Luna, looking to force the Chinese debutants to a late-game scenario. However, the laning stage started hot for 1win who found two kills on Mirana around the 5-minute mark which led to an 11-minute Aghanim's Scepter on their Beastmaster.

Aleksandr "Cloud" Zakharov became the central piece in 1win’s game plan as he was able to keep the momentum going and allowed the team to snowball towards a quick and dominant victory.

Game two was even a bigger stomp from 1win who were allowed to have Omniknight on their side and Windranger carry to mitigate most of the damage incoming from the enemy team while also allowing them to run down Team Zero and close the game with 22 kills to 3.

“The past few days were very rough for us. We trained a lot because up until now our games were very bad. We learned a lot from our series with Cloud9. They dominated in every aspect of the game and even outside the game,” said Cloud in the post-series interview for the English broadcast. He also mentioned that part of 1win’s preparation for the playoffs targeted the mental aspect and addressed the communication issues that they noticed they were having in Copenhagen.

While Team Zero bowed out of the competition in the 12th-16th place, 1win will return to their computers later today in an attempt to deliver the biggest upset in the lower bracket rounds. Their next series is scheduled at 19:00 CEST against Team Falcons.