Team Zenith finished top 16 at the ASUS Autumn Open DotA Allstars competition in their first foray into the European competitive scene, after being eliminated by Russian team SAY_PLZ (sP).
The only team outside of Russia participating, and possibly the first Asian DotA team to play in Europe, Zenith started out as one of the favourites to win the competition held in Moscow, Russia.
They did not disappoint as they emerged from the group stages with a clean slate of 3 wins and no losses, defeating teams ApEm, PRO and TeaM Vihashed. According to a blog post by Anthony "Ant" Moh, Zenith even defeated one team by a huge margin of 53-7 in just 34 minutes.
Unfortunately, Zenith proceeded to meet eventual winners sP in the first round of the playoffs and lost in just over an hour, with a hero kill margin of 30 to 20 in favour of sP.
sP’s superior teamwork compared to Zenith was most obvious during the pivotal 55th minute engagement at top lane. sP stuck closely together while Zenith seemed to lose coherence and separated into scattered groups of ones and twos.
Accordingly, sP’s Matrix commented that he found Zenith’s team to be "somewhat strange", and added that they "laced strategywise". To Zenith’s credit, Matrix said that the game was close and described Zenith’s micro ability as "insane".
Matrix also revealed that sP intentionally forfeited a winning game against RTDT so that they would be seeded on the opposite side of the brackets from Virtus.Pro.
"We planned it (that) way to meet VP only in the finals," said Matrix about the team’s rationale for forfeiting. "We thought VP is a harder enemy, so we decided to make a nice final, instead of meeting them in (the quarter-finals)."
Zenith will be heading to Sweden next to participate in the upcoming DreamHack Winter 2007 this weekend. DreamHack is the largest LAN Party in the world, where thousands of gamers bring their own PCs to game and share a good time with each other.
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