Xtreme Gaming vs Team Aster: Aster's unstable play will take the team to the bottom of the table

The second Chinese regional final kicks off on Friday, May 06, where the top four teams from DPC league two will battle it out for extra TI11 ranking points and the prize money. The second pairing of the game day will be Xtreme Gaming and Team Aster, who will determine the strongest so far.

DPC CN 2021/2022 Tour 2: Regional Final is an online Dota 2 tournament that will take place in China from May 06 - 08, 2022. This competition was organized due to the inability of Chinese teams to travel to Sweden for the majors due to COVID-19 restrictions, so the top four teams in the Chinese region will compete against each other for $100,000,000 and 750 DPC points.

Kudos to Xtreme Gaming for their Spring DPC campaign as it was their debut season in the elite, and they finished as the Chinese vice-champions, beating tough side Aster in the tiebreak for second place. In general, for the Xtreme Gaming team, Aster was always extremely uncomfortable, they played them twice before the replay and both were not successful, but Aster is now an extremely unstable game, and this is just to the advantage of the guys from Xtreme Gaming. Undoubtedly it is a pity that we won't see this outstanding Chinese team in the majors, but they should be the ones to take the DPC points while Aster and RNG have to practice and tune up their game.

Xtreme Gaming stayed flat throughout 2021, barely playing in the Chinese league's second DPC division. But that all changed after TI10 as a number of good players moved to this young team. The second division of the new DPC cycle was decided by J, Paparazi, Srf, Pyw, and Dy. And this squad paid off, winning the regional league and gaining a slot in the elite for next season.

The Xtreme Gaming management decided to replace the players in the first and third positions after the team reached the first DPC division - with former Ybb Gaming carry Lou lou Zhen replacing Wang J Wenjun. The team's new hardliner, on the other hand, was legendary Vici Gaming player Ren ELeVeN Yangwei - he replaced Sun Srf Runfa.

The Xtreme Gaming team is clearly looking to the future, with hopes of not just becoming a leveraged team but becoming a stable member of the elite or even playing in the majors. At the Intel World Open Beijing Lunar Tournament, the team won the vice-champion title, and they won the OGA Dota PIT Season 6: China in late February. The majors were secured, but the covid broke all the plans, so it is worth it to keep their good form in the regional finals, which are no easier than the majors in terms of difficulty.

For me, this team is the biggest disappointment of the whole spring season in China. The final third place wasn't that bad, but they lost to Vici (1-2) and EHOME (1-2) in the course of the league, and they lost to Xtreme Gaming (0-2) in the battle for the second place of the season, which once again emphasizes the instability of this squad. One day this team can tear apart PSG.LGD, and then lose to the currently weak Vici. Has work been done on the mistakes? It is difficult to say, and I do not think that in a couple of weeks something has been solved, so I do not expect any results from Aster. The team expects about the same fate as in the first regional finals (the 3rd place).

The relaxation comes after the Chinese New Year. An extremely poor performance in the DPC regional finals (3rd place out of 4), then not reaching the finals at the OGA Dota PIT Season 6: China (3rd place). All this doesn't change the main point - Team Aster remains one of the top favorites in China.

Team Aster is one of China's youngest teams, formed in late 2018 and already top of their region. Last season was a mixed bag for the boys. If you judge their results within the Chinese region, they are very cool: vice-champions of the first DPC league, champions of the second DPC league, and champions of two seasons of i-League 2021. Not even PSG.LGD can boast such results in China, but on the international scene, Aster played just awful: only 9-12 places in the two majors in Singapore and Kyiv, an unsatisfactory result at TI10 as well - 13-16 place. You can look for excuses, they did not perform in the full squad in Singapore, and at TI10, the whole team suffered from coronavirus, but the fact is that no one makes concessions to the top Chinese team.

Something had to be done, and the bosses of the organization made two replacements in the squad: Ori, who moved from Vici Gaming, will play in position two, and Siamese.C, who spent last season in the Aster.Aries youth team has arrived for the fifth position. And if the first substitution is clearly a reinforcement, the second is ambiguous. Although the five is not the most key position, it's too bad that the young player was quite good during last season. If the game is not stabilized, I'm afraid the team will have to make more replacements.

I do not see an easy game for any of these teams, so I expect a tight game with three maps, and that means I suggest betting on Total Over 2.5 maps for 2.00.

The exact score of the meeting is 2-1 in favor of Xtreme Gaming; the odds on that are 3.42.

On the first map, the first kill will be made by the Xtreme Gaming team; the odds on that are 1.84.