“I remembered how fun it is to play a competitive match”: antoha summed up his experience participating in the qualifiers for The International 2026
Professional player Anton “antoha” Marchenko summarized his participation in the European open qualifiers for The International 2026 on Telegram.
The quote is reproduced with the source’s spelling and punctuation intact
I also played qualifiers for The International, where I beat Star’s stack, a stack of Stoic’s Mikey (not from the CIS), and a stack of Topson’s Artiz with Seb and Koikva. Then on the second day, Modus knocked me out—respect to them, those were fun games (Botea, Mirele). I remembered how fun it is to play competitive—there’s this dumb animalistic part of me that thinks competing is fun + it’s fun to prepare for matches, etc. Basically, I remembered why I fell in love with competitive play so long ago. I also think it’s even more fun at Tier 1—anyway, that’s about it. <...>
Antoha played for 1p2m in the second open qualifier for The International 2026. The team consisted of Artem “hairo~~” Plekhutsa, Vasily “ZipZzzap” Letov, Megoway, and Katari `. The team finished in 5th–8th place in the European qualifiers—just one step away from advancing to the closed qualifiers.
Photo — Anton “antoha” Marchenko.
