It’s a rough time to be an Aurora fan, especially considering the consequences of Aurora’s unfortunate incident at DreamLeague Season 23. During the playoffs match between Aurora and BetBoom Team, the former had to forfeit their third round due to a bad connection playing at their local LAN cafe – a huge blow in their Riyadh Masters 2024 qualification dreams.
Nuengnara “23” Teeramahanon (Image Credits: The International 10)
It was a shame that Aurora had to forfeit their third game because it had the potential to be one of the longest matches in DreamLeague S23.
70 minutes into the game, and suddenly, Aurora players disconnected and were not able to reconnect back. Despite BetBoom Team’s compassionate act of giving their own pause time to their opponent, ESL decided to end the match after 51 minutes of waiting for the technical issue to resolve.
While many viewers believed that the third game was already in BetBoom’s grasp with a 30,000 gold lead, Aurora was able to build momentum after BetBoom made a game-losing mistake of not getting Aegis of the Immortal and lost a set of top barracks.
Aurora ends DreamLeague S23 at seventh place (Image credit: Aurora)
This elimination puts Aurora out of the running to qualify for Riyadh Masters 2024 via the ESL Pro Tour Leaderboard.
However, reflecting back on the EPT point gap between Aurora and other more prospective candidates, perhaps Aurora’s likelihood to qualify is overestimated. They needed nothing less than a second-place finish at DreamLeague S23 to have a slim chance of pulling off a miracle here.
Hence, hypothetically, Aurora’s first runner-up finish at DreamLeague S23 would have leveraged them sufficient EPT points to topple Team Spirit at eighth place on the EPT Leaderboard. And even a little extra to surpass Team OG as well, but without disqualifying OG from the top-eight finish.
For the uninitiated, the EPT Leaderboard grants the top eight teams by highest earned points, a direct invite to the coveted Riyadh Masters 2024. The Riyadh Masters series boasts prize pools that rival even Valve’s International Championships and is dubbed the new TI by many fans too. This year’s iteration has a generous prize pool of $5 million, which may not be as much as its predecessors, but is still a hefty amount.
Nevertheless, it’s not the end of the season for Aurora just yet because Riyadh Masters still have multiple vacant slots. Notably, we can expect Aurora to compete for the EPT Interregional Strength Rankings.
This qualifier invites teams by their strengths throughout the season, which is good news for Aurora. After all, Aurora has grown exponentially in recent tournaments, especially since we last saw them secure a top seven finish at PGL Wallachia S1 and the DreamLeague S23, too. So hopefully, they wouldn’t have an internet issue this time around, since they will play in their own Southeast Asian server.
Otherwise, the Southeast Asian closed qualifier could be their last resort too, in case things went south at the EPT Interregional Strength Rankings. The Riyadh Masters Dream lives on for Aurora!
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