D2L Western Challenge is now on its final stage of the competition, with the six-day, double elimination playoffs slated to start today. Kicking off will be Cloud9 vs RoX.KiS at 18:00 CEST (09:00 PST), and it will be followed by Natus Vincere against Fnatic at 21:00 CEST (12:00 PST).
After more than two-and-a-half months since the tournament started, we are now moving on into the final phase of the D2L Western Challenge. The tournament, originally starting with eight teams, now only has six teams competing for the championship and biggest share of the prize pool.
The playoffs will run over six consecutive days, following a double-elimination format. The top two teams from the group stage gets seeded directly into round 2 of the upper bracket.
Evil Geniuses was a clear first place after their 6-1 groups record. However, it was more complicated to determine the second place team because of a three-way tiebreaker. In the end, it was team Empire who got the second place after being deemed to have a better map and head-to-head performance against the two other teams who finished with a 5-2 record, Cloud9 and Natus Vincere.
All games will be best-of-three, except for the best-of-five finals. It will kick off today with Cloud9 vs RoX.KiS at 18:00 CEST (09:00 PST), and it will be followed by Natus Vincere against Fnatic at 21:00 CEST (12:00 PST). Streams are available in English, Russian, Spanish, German, Vietnamese and Chinese.
The Champion of this tournament will get $25,000, half of the total prize pool. The second, third and fourth placer will receive $15,000, $7,500 and $2,500 respectively.
All of the six playoff teams will also receive a portion of the DotaTV ticket profits. The first and second place team will get 25% each, the third and fourth placer will receive 15% apiece and the last two will get 10% each. $14,662 was contributed to the pool at the time of publication.
