Bach on winning the qualifier for The International 2026: “When we won, we all gathered together, and everyone had tears in their eyes.”

We all discussed it together and collectively decided on the draft that would work best for us. On the first map, we thought about it for a long time, but we just couldn’t pick the heroes we wanted to play the most. But in the second game, when we had the first pick, we took Snapfire—a hero we’ve practiced a lot with and play quite well.

Ancient Apparition, Tiny, and Timbersaw are our strongest combo from practice. Plus, Sniper is the hero Xm plays best, and he fits perfectly into our draft. You could say this is everything we’ve got—our 100 percent, even 1,000 percent. Each of us plays the hero we’re best at, and with this combination, we’ve had the highest win rate throughout our entire practice period.

We have a pretty good sense of when this draft starts to click. Somewhere around the mid-game, when we get Blink Dagger and BKB, we start constantly poking and looking for opportunities. In the last game, we were all pretty calm—our communication was level-headed.

When we’re in a strong phase, we can take up positions, place defensive wards, and if an opportunity arises to kill or catch an enemy under a ward, we take advantage of it. The enemy had an “Aegis,” but by the end we had two Divine Rapiers, and I’d gotten tankier, so we felt that they couldn’t outplay us in team fights anymore. And that’s when we decided it was time to go out and hunt them down ourselves.

And although some of the players may not have had professional training squads before, they’ve definitely put in a lot of work during this time—you can see it in their gameplay. The pace was very high, everyone was in top form, and the rhythm of the matches was even better than in our recent practice sessions against European Tier 2 teams. We also trained with Europeans here, and these guys played better than them, in my opinion. There was definitely competition here.

As for what didn’t work out for us—we didn’t always choose the most comfortable draft in every game; sometimes we picked something that was a bit of a struggle for us. And during the games themselves, we sometimes lacked attention to detail; at times we got into fights we shouldn’t have, and with such a packed schedule, we couldn’t handle it properly.

Looking back on the entire journey, we were on the brink twice, played those incredibly tense matches, and ultimately managed to win—we’re very, very, very happy.

When we won, we gathered together, and everyone was in tears. Our emotions just came pouring out. I think it was a really great journey. These qualifiers strengthened our bond and improved our gameplay—I’m confident we’ll grow from this experience. And at The International, we’ll definitely show even more of what we’re capable of.