"Bye Bye Kuku," Says ViCi as it Knocks Out T1 From TI11 LCQ

With eight teams remaining in the The International 2022 (TI11) Last Chance Qualifiers, the end of Day Two will reduce the numbers of teams to four as the teams will look to avoid elimination in the Playoffs stage. In the Lower Bracket, the last Southeast Asian (SEA) team in the LCQ, T1, were looking to advance further as it faced off against Vici Gaming. Despite an epic series of games, Vici Gaming came out as the final victors of the series as T1’s journey in the TI11 LCQ had ended.

Following the victory, Vici Gaming’s carry player Yang "Erika" Shaohan all-chatted “Bye Bye Kuku” as he and his team eliminated the SEA team from the event, to which Kuku responded with a simple “Bye.”

Vici Gaming vs T1: Match recap

With Polaris Esports being eliminated yesterday, T1 became the sole flag bearer of the SEA region in the Last Chance Qualifiers. While the team did lose to Team Secret in the Upper Bracket earlier today, T1 are hoping to advance into the TI11 Group Stages from the lower bracket.

However, Vici Gaming wanted to end T1’s hope of attending their home TI after eliminating Wildcard Gaming earlier today.

Game One

T1 started off with a standard draft, as it picked up Topias "Topson" Taavitsainen’s Primal Beast and Carlo “Kuku” Palad’s infamous Venomancer while Vici Gaming went for a stable draft in Chaos Knight and Puck as the primary cores.

While the early game went in favor of Vici Gaming’s draft as T1’s heroes lacked the escape mechanism from all of the stuns, the late game timing for T1 hits perfectly as Anathan "ana" Pham’s Slark and Topson’s Primal Beast were completely unstoppable as the SEA team closes out Game One after 30 minutes.

Game Two

The second game was a back and forth game, as Vici Gaming was dominating the map in the laning phase and the mid-game. However, mistakes from the Chinese team allowed T1 to even the playing field going into the late game despite having a net worth deficit of 4K.

Despite the massive teamfights from both teams, ana’s Lone Druid was not enough for T1 to close out the series as the Primal Beast-Morphling duo of Vici Gaming managed to kill off all of T1’s heroes, who were without buybacks. Vici Gaming secured Game Two after 57 minutes.

Game Three

With the series coming to a third game decided, both teams wanted to play it safe as T1 picked Faceless Void and Puck for its two main cores. Vici Gaming on the other hand, went back for Morphling while also picking up Rubick for Pan "Frisk" Yi.

While the laning phase started off well for T1, Frisk’s clutch plays on the Rubick allowed Vici Gaming to build up a net worth advantage of 9K going into the late game. To make things worse, a forced teamfight by T1 allowed Vici Gaming to claim the first Roshan of the game after teamwiping the SEA opposition and closed out the game after 39 minutes.

Following the series, Vici Gaming will await the winner of the Team Liquid vs Xtreme Gaming series in the Lower Bracket Semifinals. However for T1, their Dota Pro Circuit season will end here as it is now eliminated from the LCQ.