Alliance Disqualified from D2CL
In a surprise announcement, former The International 2 (TI) champions Alliance have been disqualified from the Dota 2 Champions League (D2CL) tournament.
Alliance team captain Jonathan “Loda” Berg announced over his twitter account that his team has been disqualified from the tournament. The decision was made by D2CL organizers under project manager, Artem Bykov.
In an official statement released by D2CL, Mr. Bykov summarized that the decision is final based on Alliance’s lack of a stand-in player. Rasmus “Chessie” Blomdin, Alliance’s player registered for the tournament, was placed out of commission due to back problems. Alliance was unable to secure the services of their ESL One New York stand-in Kai “H4nni” Hanbueckers as he is already participating in D2CL under team 4Anchors.
In a statement released in the D2CL front-page, Mr. Bykov reiterated the decision:
Tonight at D2CL Season 4 the last two matches of The Alliance were due to be played. Unfortunately, The Alliance could not participate in these matches and therefore were disqualified from the tournament. Also, all results of previously played matches featuring The Alliance were nullified. You can find the official statement of D2CL below.Several days ago The Alliance asked D2CL administration to postpone both remaining matches (vs Fnatic and Virtus.pro) to October, 14th. D2CL could not agree to that for several reasons: The Alliance not having a wildcard available (it was used earlier for the match against Virtus.pro which was originally scheduled for September, 30th) and the beginning of play-off stage, scheduled for October, 14th. LAN-finals start pretty soon and some teams need to make visas to get to Bucharest, and therefore play-off stage can not be delayed. The Alliance management was informed about this.During the last several days D2CL administration had tried to understand if The Alliance would have been able to play on October, 7th. Today, 30 minutes prior to the game start, The Alliance management told D2CL that the team will not be able to play against Fnatic but will play against Virtus.pro, and did not answer any questions about this. Later one of The Alliance players overturned the words of team management and stated that his team will forfeit both matches.
According to league rules, a team is punished with 15 Penalty Points for refusing to play a match. Therefore, The Alliance receive 60 Penalty Points and are disqualified from the league (clause 4.3) and all their current results in Season 4 are nullified. It was the most hard, though the only right decision, which meet the sport standards and allow to put everyone in equal terms.
D2CL administration would like to apologize for an inaccuracy in league rules which stated that a team gets 15 Penalty Points for a whole Best of 2 match, but not for each map. The earlier occurred situation with Natus Vincere getting 15 Penalty Points for refusing to play Map 2 against Cloud9 is by the numbers with league rules.
With Alliance’s results removed, Power Rangers drop from 4th to 5th, Team Tinker who held an unassailable 2nd place spot with 8-6 are now tied with Cloud9 at 6-6 — leaving Team Tinker in a potential three-way tie.
Na’Vi benefited the most from Alliance’s disqualification as they are in a position to lock up the 2nd place spot with a win against VP.
Subscribe to INQUIRER PLUS to get access to The Philippine Daily Inquirer & other 70+ titles, share up to 5 gadgets, listen to the news, download as early as 4am & share articles on social media. Call 896 6000.
