The prestigious Dota 2 Kiev Major took place from April 24-30, featuring the best 16 teams worldwide, battling for a total prize money of $3,000,000 USD. Kiev was the first Dota 2 Major held in Swiss System and the mousesports players were looking to follow up on their 2nd place finish at the Boston Major, which they’ve achieved under the Ad Finem brand.

GROUP STAGE

The group stage started with a tough matchup, as mousesports was set to face off against the DAC 2017 champions of Invictus Gaming. In two rather short games, mouz fell 0-2 to the Chinese team, who have been one of the favorites going into the Kiev Major.
In their second match of the day, the Greeks were looking to recover from their opening round loss, when they lined up against Newbee. In a 74-minute thriller in game 3, mousesports wasn’t able to close the game when they had the chance to, so Newbee crawled their way back into the game, eventually winning 2-1 to push mouz to a 0-2 record.
When the odds looked grim for mousesports, they stroke back. In the third round, mousesports was finally able to claim their much needed first victory with a quick 2-0 in the series against iG Vitality. Especially SsaSpartan on Pudge delivered some game-changing hooks, while the rest of his squad managed to step up their game from the previous rounds. This mousesports team looked promising to make an impact in Kiev, but in round four, VGJ claimed a 2-0 defeat over the Greek team, putting them on 14th place after the end of the group stage.

MAIN EVENT

The Main Event in the National Palace of Arts was opened by an electrifying crowd – the Ukrainian Dota fans filled the arena early on Thursday morning, with mousesports and Invictus Gaming set to open the $3,000,000 USD Main Event.
The crowd-favorites of mousesports have been struck hard in the first game of the best-of-three series, as iG managed to showcase why their Treant/Juggernaut combination is considered a deadly duo, as they’ve been able to pick up a 1-0 lead, before heading into a small break.
But team captain SsaSpartan and his team came back into the arena with a draft inspired by Team Secret, which led them to victory over iG in the group stage. In a thrilling match, with mousesports taking a slight advantage in the early game, a series of great split second decisions and a MVP performance by Skylark led them to victory over iG to tie the series 1-1.