Team Secret claims trophy at GWB 2020 among record viewer hours

The Gamers Without Borders 2020 Dota 2 tournament was hosted over the weekend with 8 participating teams play for a charitable cause. Every team was given the choice to donate their charity prize to whichever cause they want. With eight of the world’s finest teams clashing, it certainly garnered hype on top of the massive 1.5M USD prize pool for charity. The tournament featured Team OG, Team Secret, Nigma, Virtus.pro, Alliance, Ninjas in Pyjamas and Team Liquid.

GWB 2020 recorded a whopping 1.8 million hours watched in just 23 hours of air time. Along with 167K peak viewers. It seems like the decision to just let the people’s streamers support their tournament is a viable initiative.

© Team Secret

Undisputable Champions

Once again, Team Secret claims their expected victory at the GWB 2020, winning 750K USD. However, the winnings are all going to charity. Team Secret announced that they will be donating their reward to the Gavi, The Vaccine Alliance and The International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement. The squad has now won two events back to back, after stomping the Pushka League last week.

Looking at the grand finals, Team Secret overwhelmed Navi in a clean 3-0 sweep. In game 3, Yapzor of Team Secret played an unconventional support Luna. Yet, he made it look like it was the current game meta. The quick burst of Lucent Beams onto an area, easily kills off Navi’s supports. This led to their opponent’s carry being zoned out and kited before he could deal any impact.

Right after Terrorblade’s BKB wears off, Lasse Aukusti “MATUMBAMAN” Urpalainen dives onto the vulnerable Terrorblade, killing him in an instant. Thus, there’s no questioning who is the strongest team at GWB2020.

We did ask if Secret’s Dota 2 odds would go down after last weeks victory, and the answer was a solid “No”. Those who were wise enough to bet on Secret straight up, went home with nice winnings.

The Outrageous Upset on OG

Although Navi looked out of Team Secret’s league, they still gave the favourites, Team OG, an upset. It was the semi-finals, the two teams were tied in their best-of-3 series. All that remained was the third game, team OG managed to snowball into midgame. Sumail’s Morphling had Manta Style, Mask of Madness (MoM) and half a Butterfly at only 20 minutes.

As OG confidently marched down middle lane, Sumail’s itchy finger had to activate the MoM. The item gives the user rapid attack speed and life-steal at the cost of being silenced. One moment later, Navi initiated on Sumail with every skill they had. Yet, what sealed his grave was the silence effect that he could not purge off. Even with Manta, Sumail could not get rid of the self-induced silence, leading to his pathetic death. That opening was all Navi needed to send team OG out of GWB2020.

Official Streamers

Last week, the DOTA2 community was enlightened with spicy drama between tournament commentator, Kyle and full-time streamer, AdmiralBulldog. In the long post, Kyle basically explained how tournament organizers (TO) are making less revenue. He blamed that popular streamers are “taking” some of the viewership. Thus, there was a massive debate on whether tournament organizers should have exclusive right to broadcast live matches from their event.

In contrast to traditional TOs, the folks behind GWB2020 took the alternative to have full-time streamers such as AdmiralBulldog and Gorgc stream their tournament. Perhaps this could be an eye-opening breakthrough for TOs to just hire streamers if they do not want to lose out on lesser viewership.

The GWB 2020 concluded as a successful charity event that really brought many parties together. From DOTA2 fans to charity supporters, and even the popular streamers together. Once again, it just goes to show that popular streamers shouldn’t necessary be labelled as viewership hogging.

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