With the Chinese regional qualifiers in motion, EPICENTER announced Invictus Gaming as their fifth directly invited team to the LAN event.
This year’s edition of EPICENTER will feature two Chinese teams fighting in Moscow. One qualified and one directly invited. While the Chinese regional qualifiers commenced today with eight squads battling in a double elimination bracket for the one spot available to Moscow, Invictus Gaming got spared from the qualifiers hustle.
EPICENTER’s direct invite comes in extremely handy for IG, who are going to play in the regional qualifiers for The Summit 7 starting tomorrow. However, their secondary squad, iG Vitality are not as lucky. They are playing in both EPICENTER and The Summit 7 qualifiers rounds, and both tournaments offer only one spot into the LAN phase for the Chinese region.
While iG. V has to work more for a possible LAN event presence ahead of The International 7, with this EPICENTER direct invite, Invictus Gaming already secured no less than four tournaments for themselves. Their LAN itinerary will start in less than two weeks, with SL i-League Invitational, then, at the end of the month, they will travel to Manila, Philippines for The Masters. Right after the Manila Masters, IG are expected to land in Taipei, Taiwan to participate at the first edition of Zotac Cup, tournament for which they qualified. Zotac Cup will end on the 3rd of June and IG has little time to get to Moscow for EPICENTER 2017. The event group stage kicks off on the 4th of June and hopefully, the organizers will not schedule any match for IG on the first day.
But, until the LAN stage, one more squad is impatiently waiting to receive the last direct invite to the event. EPICENTER announced yesterday the entire participants list at the regional qualifiers and a few names are missing from it. From Europe, Mousesports and Ninjas in Pyjamas are not featured in the brackets and from America the most notable team not playing the qualifier round is Digital Chaos (ex Onyx). Both EU and US regional qualifiers will kick off later today so, the last direct invite is expected to be revealed soon.
