Astini commented on LGD Gaming’s elimination from The International 2026

This comes as no surprise to anyone. I was rooting for Team Yandex and LGD Gaming in this tournament. My heart was already broken when I watched the matches.

It’s sad to see LGD heading home early, but they had a good tournament, despite all the external challenges they faced—both professionally, having to travel to the world’s biggest championship with a last-minute replacement, and personally, due to betrayal.

Everyone can be proud of making it to TI. That’s an achievement in and of itself. And the players fought until the very end, even after losing to one of the tournament’s early favorites and forcing this grueling decisive match.

Naturally, all sorts of theories will start popping up now: if we’d had a different hero, the series would have turned out differently. As if, in the game I just watched on my screen, you could simply swap out a character to turn a loss into a win, right? Just like that! And so on.

I think we can have healthy discussions about what could have been done better—both in gameplay and in the draft—and that’s exactly how we can evolve as a region. But the first step is to give a standing ovation to all the warriors who represented us. Congratulations, guys, and on to the next challenge.