Noticed on the loss in The International 2026 finals: “It feels like there’s a hole inside you.”

I’m glad we made it to the finals. It’s been a great run. But I don’t know… it feels like there’s a hole inside you. I don’t know how to put it. And you can see that we could have won that game. I don’t know, it makes me a little sad.

Juggernaut was giving Hoodwink a lot of freedom on the lane because they’d completely destroyed that lane. At the 10-minute mark, we could have very easily won that game. That’s the most painful part for me. Maybe we just forgot about it during the game. You’re still focused on the game, trying to make it better for the team, but you forget certain things. Maybe it’s because we haven’t played much with Invoker, and this was actually our first game with him at this tournament.

We simply forgot that Hoodwink had free rein, and we didn’t use him in the top lane. We didn’t take out Lifestealer and his tower earlier. Nobody called for it—not me, not 9Class, nobody at all. We didn’t mess up the start of the game, but we could have done a lot more. And, in my opinion, we really could have won this game in ten minutes.

We did everything right: we won two lanes. All we needed was for Hoodwink to stop helping Juggernaut—he’d just go through the portal. By then, Juggernaut would be unkillable. <…>

Imagine this: Hoodwink goes through the portal, and the three of us, with Sun Strike, destroy Lifestealer’s game. He can’t get near the creeps. I soon get Dominator, I destroy the top half of the map, take down the large camp twice, and clear every wave. The level-5 Lifestealer is just farming the jungle. I don’t know, I wouldn’t like playing Lifestealer that way.

[KheZu: Did the way they started that fight catch you off guard?]

No, we expected that. But to be honest, I don’t understand what happened in the fight. How could we have lost it? I get why Mirana goes first, but that Mirana died in a second. We have our own outpost. <…>

And here, I just missed Pangolier with my ultimate. I don’t know—at some point, it’s just pure randomness. But I guess if we’d handled that fight better, we could’ve won.

[KheZu: It’s probably not that helpful to analyze this fight endlessly. It’s the 62nd minute. If they’d lost, they could have watched the replay too and said, “If we’d done this, we would have won.”]

It’s still largely about feel. You can’t plan everything out in advance in a fight like that. <…>

We discussed a lot of things. For example, with Invoker, we probably should have bought Aghanim’s Scepter—then Lifestealer would have died even without my ultimate. I could have used my abilities better. In the next situation like that, if I have Refresher, I’ll just hit that carry with two ultimates to the head. I’ll use both ultimates right away. <…>

A friend sent me this video, and I watched it: Lifestealer literally survives my ultimate. You can pause it—he has just one HP left to survive. <…> Imagine my face when I saw that after the final. I felt so bad.

Maybe it wouldn’t have helped, because we all died anyway. But maybe it would have—I don’t know. I guess we shouldn’t focus on just that one moment, but try to draw more useful conclusions: how to play the early game, how to handle fights in other situations. Because it’s really hard to explain everything that happened here.

After the final, I thought all ten players played well. After watching the replay, I think all ten players played poorly. That’s my opinion. <…>

For viewers, it was a very good final. But when you watch it as a professional player, you see a lot of mistakes. I think if they had played better, they could have produced some better moments. And if we had played better, we might have won.