The Path to The Dota 2 Championship

[Omnomnick]

With only a month to go before the start of The International 2014 on July 18th 2014, Valve have released a new blog post to detail the remaining stages of the tournament. A new announcement page has revealed the Playoff event, previously described as the "Play-Ins", will take place from July 8th through 14th, and will involve all 19 remaining teams.

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The Playoffs will be broken up into three distinct phases. Phrase One, which will take place on July 8th, will see qualifier runner-up teams Team Liquid, MVP Phoenix, CIS Game, and Virtus.Pro compete in a series of Best-Of-3 matches to decide which team will take the 16th and final position in the tournament. After the three losing teams are eliminated, Phase Two will then run from July 9th until the 12th.​

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Phase Two places the 16 core teams into a single group where they will battle each other once. At the end of Phase Two, only 10 teams will survive, as the top 2 highest performing teams will advance directly to the main event's Upper Bracket while the middle 8 will enter Phase Three of the Playoff series. The bottom 6 teams will be eliminated from the tournament. Phase Three will then run from July 13th through the 14th.​

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The middle 8 teams from Phase Two will be placed into a pair of Best-Of-3, four-team brackets based on their performance in Phase Two. On July 13th, the losing team of the lowest ranking match will be eliminated from the tournament while the winning team will have to face off against the higher ranked teams in order to determine their position in the main event. At the end of the day, 2 teams will advance to the main event's Lower Bracket, while the final team will join the highest performing teams of Phase Two in the Upper Bracket. This system is then repeated with the 4 remaining teams on July 14th in order to finalise the 8-team roster for the main event, which runs from July 18th until the 21st.​

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The main event will use a double elimination, Best-Of-3 system to whittle down the 8 remaining teams to decide who will be participating in the Best-Of-5 grand final on July 21st. The winner of the grand final will become the Dota 2 International 2014 Champions and take home around $5,000,000 in prize money.​

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It's a rather lengthy and complicated system, so make sure you check out the official announcement page over on the Dota 2 website for more information. Good luck to all the teams who will be participating in this year's event, it should be one hell of a show!​