TI 2025 Group Stage Round 1: Falcons survive a Nemesis scare

Day 1, Round 1 in The International 2025 Swiss-group stage has already delivered quite a few highlights, with the biggest one being Nemesis’ giving a huge scare to Team Falcons.

Nemesis are the team with the fewest official matches played in the season leading up to TI 2025. Ahead of their opening series in Hamburg, Germany, Nemesis had just 71 matches under their belt in the 2024-25 competitive season against Falcons' 294. The two teams have also never played against each other, which made their confrontation in the first round even more exciting.

Stats don’t lie, but do they matter at TI?

Nemesis seem to clearly not care about them, while for Falcons is quite the opposite. The latter stuck to their ideas and their drafting patterns used for the past couple of months. For game one in the BO3 series, they secured the Hoodwink-Sandking nuke combo, while having Ammar "ATF" Al-Assaf on his signature Mars. Those alone were strong enough tools to take a convincing win, but headed into the second game, Nemesis struck back with a draft built for team fights and building damage.

Luna, Leshrac, and Enigma were their core choices, which, despite struggling early to mid game stages, were able to turn the game around in the late game and push Falcons to a decisive game three.

Team fight control was once again prioritised by Nemesis in the final game of the series. They came with a clear plan on how to counter Falcons and executed it nearly to perfection. They had the confidence to pick Razor, one of ATF’s strongest heroes, and tried to control Falcons with Global Silence and through itemisations. They had four Refresher Orbs and four Black King Bars between the five heroes, which basically forced Falcons to rely mostly on their right click and forget about spell damage.

Nemesis pushed the game to a 70-minute madness, but ultimately Falcons’ incomparable competitive experience, capacity to stay calm and find solutions in situations that seem impossible to fix, allowed them to survive and move forward into round two of the Swiss group stage format with a victory under their belt.

Round 2 will pit Falcons against Tundra Esports in the winner's bracket and Nemesis against Yakutou Brothers in the loser’s side. Stay tuned on rdy.gg for the latest news and results from the pinnacle Dota 2 tournament of the year.