Dota 2

The Dota 2 competitive circuit

Dota 2 is a five-versus-five MOBA with a large hero pool, a long draft phase and games that regularly run past forty minutes. Series are best-of-three or best-of-five in most playoff brackets, with best-of-two and best-of-one still common in group stages.

Tournament structure

• The International (TI): Valve's yearly world championship and the most prestigious title in Dota. Teams qualify through direct invites and regional qualifiers.
• ESL One and DreamLeague: the ESL circuit, including large LAN events and online DreamLeague seasons that attract the full top tier.
• PGL events: another major organiser running LAN tournaments through the year.
• Riyadh Masters and the Esports World Cup: a high-profile summer stop for the top teams.
• Regional and tier-2 events: a constant stream of online leagues across Western Europe, Eastern Europe, China, Southeast Asia and the Americas.

What decides games

The draft is a bigger factor in Dota than in any other major esport. A lost draft can be a lost game before the horn. Patches from Valve can be large and shift the meta overnight, and the teams that read a new patch first tend to farm results for a few weeks. Comebacks are common because of buyback, Roshan and late-game scaling, which makes live betting both attractive and dangerous.

How to use this hub

• Matches: upcoming Dota 2 series with game-by-game results.
• Pro settings: keybinds, sensitivity and display setups used by pro players.
• Teams: rosters, recent form and head-to-head records.
• Betting sites: bookmakers ranked on Dota 2 coverage, including game handicaps, totals and objective markets.

The Dota 2 betting guide covers the markets in detail, and the live betting guide explains why Dota is the game where in-play discipline matters most.