Ainkrad provided a mid-tournament assessment of his team’s performance in the group stage of the 2026 Dota 2 Esports World Cup

We need to draw some preliminary conclusions from the group stage. So, we played against Aurora yesterday. Well, there’s *** [nothing] to say—they’re a strong team. They do everything pretty quickly and precisely; their lanes are *** [perfect], and they play according to the meta. Like, in the first game, we were somehow still hanging in there. But, to be honest, “Beast” was pretty problematic.
We tried to pull something off a couple of times. We got into a bit of a scuffle there, and that pretty much ended the game. The second game was just *** [horrible]—we got crushed on the lanes because I *** [lost] to the guy in mid, and we couldn’t do anything at all.

We played Team Liquid today. We played the first game pretty well with Void Spirit and Drow Ranger. The draft was ours, and overall, we already felt much more comfortable. We were able to have a team call before the games, so, to be honest, I felt good during the game. By the way, yesterday my SSD—which we were setting up—got damaged, so I didn’t have time to chat with the team before the match. That’s exactly why we *** [lost] to Aurora; otherwise, they wouldn’t have *** [wiped us out]. Be sure to check out my gameplay in the second match—here are the first 6 minutes. Well, you can watch the rest too, basically all the way to the end of the game; there’s a lot to learn.