I installed Dota 2 in 2016 because somebody told me it was free. That is the entire origin story. No documentary, no esports moment, no friend patiently walking me through a hero. Someone said the words “it’s free” and I clicked download, and somehow that click is now 10 years old.
10 years of Dota is a strange thing to say out loud, because it is not a decade of fun. It is a decade of a game I love and hate at the same time, that I have uninstalled more times than I can count and reinstalled every single time. It is my comfort game. That phrase sounds ridiculous when it is attached to the most stressful video game ever built, and it is still the most honest thing I can say about it.
This week, while The International 2026 plays out in Shanghai and the grand final sits one sleep away, 10 years of Dota has stopped feeling like a number and started feeling like a receipt.
What 10 years of Dota actually looks like
It does not look like a steady hobby. It looks like binge cycles. Two months of queueing every night, then four months of the icon sitting there untouched, then a hard uninstall after one game that goes badly enough to feel personal. Then a patch lands, or a friend sends a clip, or TI comes around, and the install goes back on the drive like nothing ever happened.
Measured honestly, 10 years of Dota is probably five years of playing and five years of telling myself I had stopped.
I have played every position over those 10 years, and I think that is the actual reason I never managed to leave. I have been the carry who farmed for 40 minutes and lost anyway. I have been the mid who got solo killed at minute three and had to sit in that feeling for the next hour. I have been the offlaner who exists to be dove under tower. And I have been the support who bought the wards, stacked the camps, died first in every fight and watched someone else get the credit.
Playing all five roles does something to how you see the game. You stop being able to blame anyone cleanly, because you have been every single person you want to blame. You know exactly how the pos 5 felt when you screamed at them for missing a smoke, because you were that pos 5 last Tuesday.
The love and the hate are the same thing
People outside Dota assume the hate is a separate feeling from the love, like the game is 70% good and 30% bad. It is not like that. The reason a win feels the way it does is precisely because losing feels the way it does. You cannot keep one and throw away the other. The 45 minute comeback only means something because you spent 30 of those minutes genuinely believing it was over.
That is also why it works as a comfort game. Comfort is not the same as pleasant. Comfort is knowing exactly what a thing is going to do to you. After 10 years of Dota I know the shape of every bad game before it happens. There is no surprise left in the disappointment, and somehow that makes it safe.
If you are trying to work out whether any of this is worth starting in the first place, I wrote a much more practical version of that argument in Dota 2 in 2026: is it still worth playing? This post is the emotional one.
TI 2026 knocked out three of my five players in a day
I have never been a team person. I could not tell you which org I support, because I do not support one. I follow players. Five of them, specifically: GH, SumaiL, No[o]ne, Nisha and Satanic. That list is the closest thing I have to a rooting interest, and it has survived roster shuffle after roster shuffle for years.
The International 2026 took three of them off the board inside the same stretch of the lower bracket.
GH and SumaiL were both on Nigma Galaxy, the roster KuroKy still coaches, with SumaiL on carry and GH at position 4. They upset Team Falcons, the defending champions, and for about a day it looked like the run was real. Then Team Yandex reverse swept them 2-1, and BoomBoys finished the job in the lower bracket. Top six, and out.
Nisha went out on the same side of the bracket with Team Liquid, who had just knocked Falcons out entirely before running into Team Spirit and losing the series in 43 minutes on the closing game.
SumaiL retiring is the part that actually landed
Losing is normal. Every TI ends with 15 teams going home. What made this one different is that SumaiL used the post match interview to confirm what he had been hinting at all year: he is done. Asked whether the run left him any reason to reconsider, he said he would sit with it, but that he does not see a path back.
Here is why that hit harder than it should have. SumaiL won The International in 2015, at 16 years and 4 months old, with Evil Geniuses. He is still the youngest person to ever win a TI and nobody has come close since. He took the finals MVP, his team took the largest esports prize in history at that point, and Time put him on their most influential teenagers list the following year.
That was 2015. I started playing in 2016. I have never had a single day of Dota that did not have SumaiL somewhere in the background of it. He was the thing that already existed when I arrived. My 10 years of Dota and his entire professional career are almost exactly the same window, and he is walking out of the building at the precise moment I hit the round number.
Falcons support Cr1t has hinted at the same thing about his own career this week. This is starting to look like the TI where a generation quietly signs off.
No[o]ne and Satanic are the last two standing
Which leaves me with two, and by pure accident they are on the same team.
No[o]ne is playing mid and Satanic is on carry for TEAM VISION, alongside Noticed, 9Class and Dukalis, coached by Puppey. They went undefeated through the Swiss group stage, became the first team to lock a direct playoff spot, and reached the upper bracket final without dropping a series. Satanic is there partly by circumstance, having been moved to inactive at Team Spirit when Yatoro and Collapse came back.
As I write this on Saturday night they are in the upper bracket final against Team Yandex, one series away from walking straight into the grand final.
So my entire remaining stake in The International 2026 is one roster, and if they lose, my TI is over while the tournament keeps going. That is what happens when you follow people instead of logos. It is a worse strategy and I am not going to change it. 10 years of Dota has not taught me a better one.
The grand final
The International 2026 finishes on Sunday, August 23 at the Oriental Sports Center in Shanghai, with the grand final played as a best of five. Every other series in the playoffs has been a best of three. The prize pool climbed from a $1.6 million base to close above $3.33 million.
Team Falcons, who came in as reigning champions, are already gone. Whatever happens tomorrow, this TI has been a bad one for anybody who expected the established order to hold. In 10 years of Dota I have learned not to bet on the favourite at this event, and TI 2026 has been another argument for that. If you want the wider context on how big these events have become, the numbers are in our breakdown of 2026 esports viewership records.
I will queue again on Monday anyway
Whoever lifts the Aegis, the thing I keep coming back to is that 10 years of Dota did not accumulate because the game was good to me. It accumulated because it was consistent. It never pretended to be fair, never got easier, never apologised. A game that treats you the same way at year 10 as it did at year one turns out to be a rare thing.
SumaiL got to leave properly, on his own terms, at a TI, in front of everybody. Most of us do not get an exit like that. We just stop queueing for a while, and then one day the launcher is open again and it is 2 a.m. and the game found us a match.
That is 10 years of Dota. I would not describe it as time well spent. I would not give it back either.
Update: Team Spirit won it
Everything above was written on Saturday, with No[o]ne and Satanic still alive and my whole TI hanging on one roster. Here is how it finished.
TEAM VISION beat Team Yandex in the upper bracket final and walked straight into the grand final. Team Spirit had to come up through the entire lower bracket to get there: a sweep of Team Liquid, then BoomBoys, then a rout of Yandex in the lower bracket final. That set up the third meeting between the two of them at this TI, and Spirit had lost the first two.
Spirit won 3-2. Yatoro opened with an uncontested Shadow Fiend, 16 kills to a single death, and found a rampage on the way to taking game one. VISION levelled it in a game that ran past the hour, with Satanic unkillable on a Divine Rapier Lifestealer. Yatoro’s Terrorblade took game three, the best game of the series. VISION forced a decider with a clean 44 minute game four. Then game five went 64 minutes, Collapse baited with a Lotus Orb and won the fight that mattered, and Yatoro’s Juggernaut closed it. Only the fifth TI grand final ever to go the full five games.
Team Spirit are now the first team to win three Internationals. Yatoro and Collapse are the first players to do it. Miposhka has three of his own, two as a player and one from the coach’s chair. They took $1.4 million out of a pool that closed above $3.33 million. The full game by game breakdown, final standings and prize money are in our TI 2026 grand final report.
So my two made the grand final and lost it in five games to a team writing itself into the record books. Which, after 10 years of Dota, is the most familiar feeling this game has. Getting close is not the consolation prize. It is most of the experience.
Sources: Liquipedia, GosuGamers, and the official Dota 2 site. Written on August 22, 2026 and updated with the final result on August 23.
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