Fnatic vs Team SMG: TI10 participants will have a tough time after the holiday

South-East Asia’s first DPC league of the 2021/22 season will continue on Saturday, December 04. Fnatic and Team SMG will meet in the first match of the day for the elite division.

DPC SEA 2021/22 Tour 1: Division I is an online Dota 2 tournament from December 01, 2021, to January 22, 2022. The top eight teams from the SEA region will battle it out for $205,000. On top of the cash prizes, the teams will compete for three entries to the majors and the crucial DPC points needed to qualify for T11.

Last season, the renewed Fnatic squad accomplished their main task by qualifying for the TI10 through the toughest closed Asian qualification. After that, the boys arrived in Europe to prepare for the year’s main tournament and did not do well in those games.

The Fnatic team performed extremely poorly in the majors in Singapore and the second DPC league. They won the first Asian DPC league but lost twice in the majors without a chance and quickly dropped out of the play-offs without getting a single DPC point for their performance. In League Two, they failed to qualify, finishing fourth and losing in the replay to Execration.

After their success in qualification, the boys took part in the BTS Pro Series Season 7: Southeast Asia, where they became the tournament’s vice-champion. In Europe, the Fnatic team found it extremely difficult. It isn't easy to evaluate their performance at TI10. The Asians finished in 9th-12th place, leaving the tournament in the second round of losers, where they lost to eventual TI10 champions Team Spirit (0:2).

After returning from Bucharest, the squad went on holiday without playing any official games. There were changes in the squad: Armel, an experienced player who played for TNC Predator for over three years, came to the midfield position, while Jaunuel, who used to play in OB Esports x Neon, took over the position five.

It’s hard to predict how this team will play now, but one thing is certain - Fnatic is a major contender for the championship in Southeast Asia.

Team SMG has some stellar Malaysian players at their disposal who could easily strengthen any Southeast Asian tier-1 team, but in the current stack, they can’t get to the result yet. The MidOne and Moon nicknames carry a lot of weight in the region.

Some experts saw this team as possible winners of the Asian qualifiers for the International. This further underlines the level of stellar characters at some of the positions. But after failing to qualify for the main tournament of the year, the boys began to play in a large number of low-rated tournaments, sometimes kicking outright horror there and at times even winning such games.

The squad has been playing together for a long time. The only change before the start of the new season’s DPC league was the arrival of the only Filipino, Raging Potato, who has experience playing in several TIs and has mainly played for Execration and Neon in the last few years. What awaits the team in this league is difficult to say, as it is their first appearance in the Asian elite, but the team should not become the whipping boys.

I expect from this confrontation a tight score, which means all three maps and Total Over 2.5 maps for 1.90.

On the first map, we believe in Total Over 52.5 frags for 1.89.

The second map will go under 37.30 minutes; the odds are 1.83.