ESL One Stockholm 2022 is the first Dota 2 Major Event of the season and it will feature the best 18 teams in the world. The participating teams qualified through the many Dota Pro Circuit qualifiers which included Western Europe, China, Southeast Asia, North America, and South America. Due to the ongoing war conflict in Ukraine, the Eastern Europe DPC region was postponed for a few weeks but it will be back with a set of online qualifiers hosted by BeyondTheSummit starting April 27 that will give the teams a chance to qualify to the Stockholm Major through a playoffs bracket.
The tournament will be held at the Hovet Arena in Stockholm on May 12 – 22. The event is going to feature a $500,000 USD and a 3,530 Dota Pro Circuit points prize pool. This tournament is considered to be special not only because it’s the first major of the year, but we’ll be seeing a lot of the new blood and we won’t have any of the most iconic EU captains like Puppey, Kuroky, Notail, S4, Fly or Misery. ESL One Stockholm 2022 is going to be a huge opportunity for the newer players to prove that their generation is the best.
Royal Never Give Up, Team Liquid, OG, PSG.LGD and TSM are some of the most hyped teams coming into this event. Most of the DPC qualifiers were very close and we even had a three-way tie in North America, if you want to see how it unfolded, you can check out the post we did covering every detail of the tiebreaker. If we look at the International Ladder’s top 10, 9 teams will be participating in this event, the only one that would be missing is Team Spirit if they fail to qualify in the EEU DPC qualifier. This tournament is completely stacked and we are sure that every match is going to be very exciting to watch.
One of the most important moments of the qualifiers was that China’s DPC league held a tiebreaker for the 4th place between Royal Never Give Up and Vici Gaming to decide which team was attending the major. But one day before the match Vici Gaming had to forfeit the match because one of their players had a sudden back issue, making him unable to sit for a long period of time. There is a DPC rule that doesn’t allow a team to use their stand-ins for more than 4 league games and Vici already had reached the limit, which means that they were basically forced to forfeit. It’s sad to see a team like Vici Gaming miss out on the tournament but Royal Never Give Up will do a good job at representing the region.
Be sure to stay tuned because we’ll keep giving updates as the tournament goes on. We’ll also post match previews, information about the participating teams, and key players to watch out for.
