When Bloomberg Business starts to cover eSports events, you know that real money is being made, and for one young Dota2 player, that number is nearing 7 digits! Robert Kolker has just put out an article following one of the youngest players in the Pro Dota2 scene. And in only one month, Sumail Hassan of Evil Geniuses has grabbed $200,000 in prize money, with a potential of over a million from The International 5, with a total prize pool close to 17 million dollars! Robert runs down his first professional victory:
Sumail and his teammates—each older than he by at least five years, and each a legend in the game—flew to Shanghai for the Dota 2 Asian Championships, with a prize for the winning team of $1.2 million.
Evil Geniuses was the third seed but, with Sumail’s help, it made it to the finals. Its opponent was a Chinese team called Vici Gaming, and the packed arena’s crowd was against them. In the first five minutes of Game Three—the last of the final—Sumail got killed four times without scoring a single kill. It was a devastating start, and the announcers said the game was basically over. But when the other team started scattering players, Sumail struck.
His avatar weakened, he shot across the field in a lightning ball and somehow scored four kills in two minutes, to the disbelief of the opposing team and the announcers commenting for the live crowd. Minutes later, he darted out of the woods to help his teammates in a skirmish and, in an explosion of fire and lightning, blasted three more enemy players to death. Before Vici could respond, Sumail rushed up the center of the map and secured the Ancient, winning the game and the tournament for Evil Geniuses. By the end, the crowd was chanting his name.
His story gets better, and I really enjoyed this read, check out this great article here.
