Empire unable to attend 1st LAN of 2015

posted by ProxyPL,
After a very unfortunate start to the 5th season of the D2L with teams pulling out of the competition the online stage has now come to an end. The first LAN of the 2015 is rapidly approaching but receives yet another blow as ru Team Empire who qualified for the offline finals in Las Vegas are unable to attend due to visa issues.
Image from d2l.gg

The finals of D2L #5 will take place from 5th to 6th of January, making it the 1st LAN of 2015. The base prize pool of the event is $50 000 and 25% of all in-game sales will be added to it. The tournament will take place in the famous city of Las Vegas.

Western divisionDue to world Cloud 9 and se Alliance pulling out of D2L #5 the Western Division got reduced to 6 teams. The favourites did not disappoint as us Evil Geniuses topped the group dropping only one match to us SNA and won the direct spot to Vegas. Although ru Virtus.Pro Polar had the same record as EG they lost in head to head match and had worst win to loss ratio so the Russians placed 2nd in the group.


Teams that finished the group stage from 2nd to 5th place advanced to the playoffs and battled for the second spot in the LAN finals. After an incredible run from the bottom of the playoffs bracket and not dropping a single game Team Empire earned their right to play in the offline finals. However it appears that it was not meant to be...



Eastern divisionThe Eastern division didn't see as many problems as the Western one so a total of 8 teams participated in the group stage. cn CDEC lost their head to head match vs cn LV but they had better win to loss ratio and based on that placed 1st in the group and gained a direct slot to the LAN finals.



Just as in Western division Chinese teams also battled in the playoffs for the second spot in the offline finals. However, this time it was much closer and eventually the highest seeded team won the ticket to Vegas.


Image from team-empire.org

Unfortunately Team Empire released a blog yesterday in which they inform that their squad is unable to attend D2L Season 5 due to visa issues. Three of their players have valid visas thanks to participating in TI 4 but both their standin ua Ilya 'Aloha' Korobkin and offlaner ru Maxim 'yoky' Kim didn't get permission to enter the USA. Because of that Empire were forced to withdraw from the tournament.

It is yet unknown who will be the replacement. Although it is very likely that VP.P, who finished 2nd in the playoffs, will also be unable to secure visas in time so it would appear that SNA is the most likely team to go to Vegas.

Teams qualified for the event:us Evil Geniuses
cn CDEC Gaming
cn LV Gaming
world ???

This article was written by pl Jędrzej Smaruj, joinDOTA's writer.Proxy has gotten into eSports in late days of SC:BW, then he got absolutely consumed by SC2:WoL. After TI2 he started following Dota 2. If he isn't doing any Dota related stuff at the moment he is probably playing poker, watching cycling or trying to figure out IT for his university.Location: Gdańsk, PolandFollow him on @ProxyPL.

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