Team Spirit Won a Third Aegis — and TI's Prize Pool Kept Falling

On 23 August, in front of a full Oriental Sports Center in Shanghai, Team Spirit beat TEAM VISION 3-2 and did something no Dota 2 organisation had ever done: won The International for a third time.

Illya "Yatoro" Mulyarchuk and Magomed "Collapse" Khalilov became the first players in the game's history to lift three Aegis of Champions — 2021, 2023, and now 2026. In a scene where a single TI win defines a career, they have three.

How it went

TI 2026 ran from 13 to 23 August: a group stage from the 13th to the 16th, then playoffs at the Oriental Sports Center from the 20th to the 23rd. Sixteen teams. One trophy that matters more than the rest of the calendar combined.

The grand final went the distance. A best-of-five decided 3-2 is the format working exactly as intended — and TEAM VISION, who most brackets did not have here, took the tournament's most decorated roster to a fifth game.

The game Team Spirit has now won on across three separate eras. (Official Dota 2 screenshot)

The number nobody wants to talk about

The prize pool finished around $3.19 million.

For context: The International 2021 had a prize pool of just over $40 million, the largest in esports history at the time. That money came from the Battle Pass — players buying a seasonal cosmetic track, with a share flowing into the pot. Valve retired that model, and the prize pool fell off a cliff.

You can argue this both ways, and both arguments are honest. A $40 million pot was never sustainable and it distorted the entire scene's economics around one tournament a year. But an event that once paid out more than most traditional sports championships now pays out less than a mid-tier tennis tournament, and the players competing at the highest level of a twelve-year-old game feel that.

What TI hasn't lost is the thing that actually made it: the Aegis is still the only trophy in Dota that anyone remembers.

Why a third Aegis is harder than it sounds

Dota 2 patches aggressively. The game Team Spirit won on in 2021 is not the game they won on in 2023, and neither resembles 2026. Rosters decay, metas invert, and the competitive lifespan of a top carry is usually measured in three or four years.

Yatoro and Collapse have now won across three distinct eras of the same game. That is the achievement — not the count.

If the tournament made you want to install it

Dota 2 is free, and it is on the shortest list of games that have stayed genuinely alive for over a decade. Be warned that it is also one of the least forgiving games ever made, and that watching TI is a very different experience from your first hundred hours.

If you'd rather ease in, our best free-to-play games roundup has softer landings. And if you want the other end of the esports calendar, the CS2 Major in Singapore runs from late November.