Team Yandex claimed the PGL Wallachia Season 7 trophy following a marathon day of DotA 2, which saw Liquid play almost eight-hours of DotA across a 12-hour period.
Liquid set a record day of endurance at PGL Wallachia Season 7
The last day of the event was a marathon day for Liquid, playing the Lower Final Bo3 and the Grand Final Bo5, but even that does not tell the whole story.
BetBoom and Liquid’s Lower Bracket Final was the second-longest Bo3 in competitive DotA 2 history, topping out at 3 hours and 45 minutes, with the longest contest being the 1 hour 23 minute Game 2.
Following the gruelling contest, the team was shortly back in the server to play their 4-hour and 10-minute Grand Final against Yandex, racking up 7 hours and 55 minutes of in-server action across a 12 hour period.
While Liquid and BetBoom’s Lower Final was exceedingly long for a Bo3, it is a full hour shorter than the Bo3 record held by Cloud9 and ScaryFaceZ. The 4-hour and 48-minute contest was held at StarLadder StarSeries Season 12: Europe and CIS in 2015.
Yandex secure PGL Wallachia Season 7 trophy with a stand-in
Going into the tournament, it was unclear whether Team Yandex would be competitive, considering the absence of Offlaner Evgeniy ‘Noticed’ Ignatenko due to Visa issues. Their first series, a 0-2 loss to Heroic, lowered expectations further.
However, the Russian roster warmed up into the competition nicely after defeating PGL Wallachia Season 6 winners MOUZ 2-1 to kickstart the event with benched Position 3 Parivision player Dmitry ‘DM’ Dorokhin.
Yandex hardly looked back from that point, dropping only two more games before Sunday’s Grand Final, defeating Falcons, Parivision, Aurora, Liquid, and BetBoom in the process.
Sunday’s Grand Final looked to again be a straightforward path for Yandex as they rushed to two 37-minute opening victories behind strong performances by Ilya ‘CHIRA_JUNIOR’ Chirtsov and Alimzhan ‘watson’ Islambekov on Ember Spirit and Ursa.
Liquid fought back, showing incredible resilience after their marathon Bo3 to take a 72-minute contest in Game 3, which saw Michael ‘miCKe’ Vu wrestle the contest in Liquid’s favour.
Suddenly, Liquid were threatening the reverse sweep as Yandex fell completely flat in Game 4, securing only a single kill in the entire 34-minute game.
However, Yandex were not to be denied in Game 5, keeping their composure as errors crept in to an exhausted Liquid in a climactic 56-minute victory that saw Yandex win with DM as stand-in.
Can Yandex continue its winning ways with their full roster? Discuss that, and more, on the new esports channel of Insider Gaming’s Discord!
For more Valve news, see Valve’s response to its recent loot box lawsuits.
Darragh is an Esports Journalist for Insider Gaming specialising in Counter-Strike. He loves to explore how esports teams work, or why they very often do not.
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