Russian Team Spirit was the underdog from the beginning.
But the team fought its way out of two shutout losses at the hands of two squads that it would eventually meet and clash with for the Aegis of Champions title Sunday evening in the last stages of Dota 2’s rich The International 10 at the National Arena in Bucharest, Romania.
Team Spirit emerged victorious after the fifth and final game of its best-of-five championship series with PSG.LGD, 3-2 (18-5, 24-8, 17-43, 2-23, 29-12), to pocket the whopping cash prize of $18,208,300 from the $40 million total pot.
The fate of Team Spirit rested in the hands of Illya Mulyarchuk, an 18-year-old Ukrainian known by his user ID Yatorro.
Yattoro proved devastating in using the 24th level Terrorblade, the Demon Marauder, as his melee agility hero character, which develops into a deadly carry in the latter stages of a game.
With Terrorblade, Yattoro led with nine kills and died only once in their clash with PSG.LGD, which played with Chinese gamers Wang Chunyu and Cheng Jin Xiang and Zhang Ruida.
Zhang, known as faith_bian, led PSG.LGD, only managed to get five kills with his level 21 Lycan in their final battle of the tournament.
“WHAT A STORY, WHAT A RUN, WHAT A DREAM!” said Team Spirit in their message on Twitter.
Team Spirit was the second Russian team to win the tournament in nine years.
PSG.LGD, which earned $522,400 as runners-up, made it to the finals with its 2-0 win over Virtus.pro. They started their campaign with a 2-0 rout of Team Spirit in Day 1 of the Group Stage.
Team Secret, which also gave the Team Spirit two of its four shutout losses in the opening stages of the competition, took a 1-2 loss to TS in the lower bracket finals to claim third place with $3,601,600.
This time, Team Spirit grabbed the early lead, by taking Game 1 and selecting its go-to heroes to get better control of the contest.
LGD became more aggressive in the early stage of Game 2, but members of Team Spirit took a laid-back approach to stay on top.
TS capitalized on Magomed “Collapse” Khalilov’s character Magnus for his leadership, and from there, Yattoro came away with 13 kills off his character, level 26 Luna the Moon Rider.