Gaming
Esports
With their TI9 win, OG have rewritten history
A year after they won the tournament, OG returned to The International and once again made history by becoming the first team to win it twice.
Every single year at The International records are broken. Every year since TI3, the prize pool has increased to be the largest in esports history, viewer numbers continue to rise with every competition and in-game statistics are blown out of the water by the best players in the world. For years, though, there have been more than a few records that have been unbroken and facts that have remained true – then OG came along at TI9, beat Liquid in the grand finals and destroyed them all.
Out of all of the previous winners of TI, no team has ever returned to the competition the following year with the exact same roster and even managed to make the top three, let alone make it all the way to the grand final and win again. That's exactly what OG have done at TI9. After a shock win at TI8, they returned with the same line-up and made another run through a near identical winners bracket to secure first place at The International 9, becoming the first team and players to ever win multiple TIs.
Find out all about Team OG's T18 win in Against The Odds:
1 h 21 min
Against the Odds
Team OG defied the odds – witness their esports journey to Dota 2 glory at TI8.
OG dominated every stage of the tournament to become two time TI champions, topping Group B after only dropping two maps, one of which was in a match that had no impact on the standings. They then went on a rampage through the upper bracket, knocking the likes of Newbee, Evil Geniuses and PSG.LGD to the lower bracket. Their carry IO strategy caught everyone off guard and was almost impossible to defeat, leading to teams just outright banning it, which opened up more traditional strategies for OG that they used to their full advantage.
You have to go all the way back to The International 2 to find a champion who managed to make it to the final. That was NaVi, who placed second after losing to Invictus Gaming. Unlike OG however, they entered the competition with a different roster to the one that had won the year before, with Sergey Antonovich 'ARS-ART' Revin replacing Ivan 'Artstyle' Antonov.
NaVi would go on to reach the final again at TI3, so OG still have to come back next year if they want to match that achievement, but again NaVi did it with a different roster, arguably making OG's achievement (all five players who won this year also lifted the Aegis of Champions in 2018) even more impressive.
After NaVi, there was a run of TI champions having underwhelming performances when they returned to defend their crown, not even coming close to OG's back-to-back wins with the same roster. TI2 winners Invictus Gaming could only manage top six at TI3, while TI3 winners, Alliance, only just made it into the top 12 at TI4. The International 4 winners Newbee had a terrible TI5, finishing in joint last place.
The next defending champions to at least put in a respectable showing at TI was Evil Geniuses, who won TI5. They too returned with a different roster, after kicking-out Kurtis ‘Aui_2000' Ling mere weeks after their win at TI5, and managed a very respectable third place at TI6. EG were without a doubt one of the strongest teams in the world around this time, but fell short of reaching the final as defending champions, showing just how impressive OG's achievement is.
Of course, TI6 winners Wings didn't even get a chance to defend their title. The team disbanded in the year after winning TI amid some controversy and the players went their separate ways. This made them the first, and so far only, TI champions not to defend their crown and also the only TI winners to only appear at one TI event. Who knows, maybe they could have become the first two-time TI champions if they'd been given the chance to defend their title.
Related
The TI7 champions, Team Liquid, looked like they could be the first team to become two-time TI champions, although not back-to-back. At TI8 they managed fourth place, but during TI9 they looked impressive, making it all the way to the final before losing to OG. One more win and they would have been the ones to claim the title of first double TI champions, not OG.
Then, of course, we come full circle to OG, winners of TI8 and TI9. The first and only team to ever win two TIs and they did it back-to-back. There's simply no question that this is the best performance across two consecutive TIs we've ever seen and you could tell by their reaction after making the final that they knew this made them the best roster to ever play multiple TIs.
They came back with exactly the same roster and put on an impressive show, dominating everyone they faced. There's simply no way to deny that this OG roster has had the best run across TIs ever seen and who knows where this run will end. It certainly wouldn't be surprising to see them come back again next year and do just as well. NaVi's record of three consecutive finals could be under threat from a team that's kept the same roster across all events. This really is an unprecedented run of success at TI and one that may never be matched.
