BetBoom Team, Vici Gaming earn spots in Dota semis at Esports World Cup

BetBoom Team and Vici Gaming became the final two teams to advance to the semifinals of the Esports World Cup Dota 2 tournament thanks to their wins Friday in Paris.

Vici opened the day with a 2-0 victory over Team Falcons, and BetBoom added a 2-0 win over Nigma Galaxy in the quarterfinal stage.

BetBoom and Vici will square off in one semifinal match Saturday with Team Yandex and PARIVISION going head to head in the other after both advanced on Thursday. The winners move on to the grand final on Sunday and the losers will compete in the third-place match.

The Dota 2 event at the Esports World Cup is the final championship of the ESL Pro Tour, now in its fourth season. The tournament has a $2 million prize pool, with $750,000 and 1,000 EWC club points going to the first-place team.

The format consists of three phases: a group stage of 24 teams that competed in a round robin, a survival phase (Tuesday-Wednesday) formatted into a single-elimination bracket that saw four teams advance, then a final playoff stage (Thursday-Sunday), which is single elimination.

The four group winners advanced directly to the playoffs. Teams finishing second through fourth in their groups went to the survival stage, a two-round bracket that decided the other four teams to make the playoff field of eight.

All matches in Phase 1 were two games, while the matches in Phases 2 and 3 are best-of-three until the best-of-five grand final.

On Friday, Vici prevailed in 57 on red and 32 minutes on green over Falcons. Guo "Xm" Hongcheng of China led the way for Vici with a kill-death-assist ratio of 29-5-21 across the two maps.

BetBoom took down Nigma in 35 minutes on red and 49 minutes on green. Ilya "Kiritych" Ulyanov of Russia put up a dominant 17-3-28 K-D-A for BetBoom.

The Esports World Cup features competition in 25 titles and a $75 million prize pool. Other upcoming events include League of Legends, PUBG, EA Sports FC, Call of Duty: Warzone, Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, Rocket League, Counter-Strike 2 and Fortnite.

The tournament continues Saturday with the semifinal matches:

-- BetBoom Team vs. Vici Gaming

--Team Yandex vs. PARIVISION

Dota 2 Esports World Cup payouts (prize money, club points)

1. $750,000, 1,000 -- TBD

2. $340,000, 750 -- TBD

3. $200,000, 500 -- TBD

4. $120,000, 300 -- TBD

5-8. $70,000, 200 -- Team Spirit, Rune Eaters, Nigma Galaxy, Team Falcons

9-12. $40,000, 0 -- LGD Gaming, 1w, Team Liquid, Aurora Gaming

13-16. $20,000, 0 -- MOUZ, Xtreme Gaming, Virtus.pro, PlayTime

17-20. $10,000, 0 -- GamerLegion, Level UP, REKONIX, OG

21-24. $7,500, 0 -- Poor Rangers, L1 Team, Team Nemesis, Inner Circle x Insanity

--Field Level Media