Dota 2's The International 9 Wrapped Up This Weekend, With Champs Raking In $15M

The ninth iteration of Dota 2's big championship event, The International, went down this past weekend, with defending champions OG Dota taking the top prize. Runners-up Team Liquid took the first match in the best-of-five series only to see OG storm back and take the final three matches to become the first repeat champions of the event.

The members of OG will walk away from the event $15,603,133 richer, with another $4,458,038 going to Team Liquid. In total, $34,292,599 was raised for the event -- as is usual for TI -- from the donations of players.

Want more numbers? How about 1.1 million? That's the peak number of viewers TI9 got, and it came during early Sunday morning in American time zones; the event took place in Shanghai, and ended at 8 p.m. local time, or 5 a.m. Pacific. That crushed Dota 2's previous record, which stood at 845,000 viewers during TI7, two years ago.

Want more on how it all went down? For that, I'll go with the excellent writeup by HypeBeast, which stated that the fourth and deciding game took just under 25 minutes, though it was a decision at the start of the match -- Team Liquid not banning Io -- that was its downfall. At least that won't go down as the worst mistake a team or player made at the tournament, where a player misclicked and chose a hero to play instead of banning him. We've all been there, man, though most of us haven't done it with such high stakes.