Yatoro and Collapse became three-time champions of The International!
The International 2026 ended unforgettably: for the first time in history, two players lifted Aegis for the third time in their professional careers. Previously, only Aui_2000 had earned this distinction, winning TI once as a player and twice as a coach.
The day started with the lower bracket final, where Team Spirit and Team Yandex clashed. The outcome was quite predictable: after all, Team Yandex's level of play was noticeably lower than that of the then two-time champions of The International. The match was remembered for the phenomenal play of Yatoro and two well-deserved MVPs in a row: on Terrorblade with a score of 16/1/3 and on Shadow Fiend with a KDA of 17/2/8. After the series, watson tersely wrote on his social media, "Yatorogoat", acknowledging the opponent's superiority:
The grand final, subjectively, was one of the best in recent years. First, what intensity: the King against the Prince, the Teacher against the Student, Yatoro against Satanic. Second, all ten players had come a long way on the road to the coveted Aegis: for No[o]ne- this TI was already his seventh, Satanic desperately wanted to prove that, despite his age, he was already worthy of the trophy, and Yatoro and Collapse repeated their path from The International 10, first going through qualifiers and then through the lower bracket to the grand final, leaving themselves only about three hours of sleep a day! And third, all the grand final players were closely intertwined: Satanic replaced Yatoro in Team Spirit during his vacation and recovery, Noticed and Larl played together back in Winstrike and in the old BetBoom Team lineup, and rue rose through the ranks together with Satanic in the Yellow Submarine youth squad.
Speaking of the chronology of the historic Team Spirit victory, we should start with the very first map. PARIVISION made a desperate decision to swap heroes in order to get better matchups, but in the long run it turned out to be a bad decision. Thus, we saw the unsuccessful debut of No[o]ne- on mid Io and first blood, as well as the subsequent standout performance from Satanic on Ember Spirit. On the second map, PARIVISION did not lose heart and easily ran over Team Spirit, picking the meta Earth Spirit and Underlord. After the third map, the scales tipped in favor of the Dragons again, and on the fourth PARIVISION leveled the score. The fifth map was, of course, a nail-biter with many swings and "on a knife's edge" moments. Take, for instance, the moment when Larl and Collapse caught and killed Satanic in the forest, preventing him from landing a successful Omnislash, or when Juggernaut used his ultimate into Collapse's Lotus Orb. It was on such mistakes that moments were created, and Team Spirit, of course, were able to take advantage of them and secure the long-awaited victory:
Nevertheless, during the entire game day we never saw a single announcement. In this regard, Valve never ceases to amaze us, and not in a good way.
The International 2026 took place from August 13 to 23 in Shanghai, China. The prize pool was $3.34 million. Follow all the latest news in our Telegram channel.