For the first time in what feels like a few years, the grand final of The International Dota 2 tournament is set up to be an incredible match between the two very best teams in the world right now. There are incredible stories on both sides, buy only one team will be able to lift the aegis and become world champions.
The final of The International 13 is set to take place at the Royal Arena in Copenhagen, Denmark at 1pm CET / 7am ET today, with Team Liquid taking on Gaimin Gladiators. The match will be a best of five series, with the winners taking home more than a million dollars and, of course, the title of Dota 2 world champions.
TI is always special, but for the last two years the grand final of TI has been a 3-0 stomp where it never really looked close and the expected winner took the victory, creating somewhat of an anticlimax for the biggest Dota tournament of the year. But this year things are different.
All of the final four teams in the tournament could easily have reached the final given how evenly match they all have been throughout the tournament and the rest of the season, and while the match scores may not have shown it a lot of the games themselves have been very back and forth with the smallest of margins deciding which team headed home.
Now we are left with Team Liquid and Gaimin Gladiators in the TI grand final, and it’s truly impossible to call who will walk out as champion.
This Team Liquid roster has never reached a TI final before, but has always been considered a contender. However, the roster seems cursed to finish second in every major event they play, falling multiple times at the final hurdle when it comes to top level events over the past few years. Breaking that curse on the biggest stage of them all would be quite the story and one of the most deserved wins ever for a roster that is beloved by almost everyone in the community.
So far they have looked near unstoppable at TI with an impressive run through the upper bracket where they took out Xtreme Gaming, Cloud9 and long time rivals Gaimin Gladiators. But we have seen this time and time again, and playing in the TI grand final is a completely different story.
On the other side of the map is Gaimin Gladiators, arguably the best team in the world over the last two years, who narrowly missed out on a maiden TI win this time last year. The roster was dominant in 2023, but couldn’t convert at the biggest events of the year. This year they have already taken victory at the Riyadh Masters, and now look to take the aegis as well, to win the two biggest events of the year.
But they do have history in their side in one way, the fact they always beat Team Liquid in grand finals. The two teams have already competed against each other in finals multiple times over the last few years, and every time Gaimin comes out on top.
It’s a long-running rivalry and the TI final stage is the perfect place to settle it once and for all as far as Gaimin is concerned, but for Liquid, it’s a chance at redemption. They have already beaten Gaimin once at this event, but the grand final is an entirely different situation, so really that 2-0 win yesterday means very little.
Whichever team comes out on top, it will be difficult to argue they didn’t deserve it. Both have already played some incredible Dota to reach this point, and it’s impossible to call who will take the aegis later today as a result. But that means that the TI 13 final is set up to be one of the best we have ever seen, so you do not want to miss any of the action.
