Team SMG vs Execration: The battle for six points

South-East Asia's first DPC league of the 2021/22 season will continue on Wednesday, January 05. Team SMG and Execration will meet in the elite division's second match of the day.

DPC SEA 2021/22 Tour 1: Division I is an online Dota 2 tournament from December 01, 2021, to January 22, 2022. The top eight teams in the SEA region will battle it out for $205,000. On top of the cash prizes, the teams will also fight for three entries to the majors and the crucial DPC points needed to qualify for T11.

It is a tough calendar for Team SMG as they have already played all the formidable teams, leaving them to face the clear-cut elite runners-up in 2022. It's worth realizing that SMG are 2-2 now, and if the team wants to qualify for the majors, they have no margin for error, then a theoretical chance of making it to the Wild Card stage is realistic.

Team SMG's first match in the elite was extremely successful. Destroying Fnatic (2-0) on two maps in less than 30 minutes was a sensation. Next up was a game against the main red-boss T1 (0-2), but the TI10 participant could not be beaten. Next up was a 2-0 victory over Motivate.Trust Gaming, with the SMG guys picking not exactly reliable drafts, but that didn't stop them from rolling over two MTG maps. The win was followed again by a defeat, this time by BOOM (0-2), who is now playing extremely well, but SMG was the leader of the SEA elite division.

Team SMG have some stellar Malaysian players at their disposal who could easily strengthen any Southeast Asian TIR-1 team, but in their current stack, they can't get to the result yet. The MidOne and Moon nicknames carry a lot of weight in the region.

Some experts saw this team as possible winners of the Asian qualifiers for the TI. This further underlines the level of stellar characters at some of the positions. But after failing to qualify for the main tournament of the year, the boys began to play in a large number of low-rated tournaments, sometimes kicking outright horror there and at times even winning such games.

The squad has been playing together for a long time, the only change before the start of the DPC league the new season was the arrival of the only Filipino, Raging Potato, who has experience of playing in several TIs and has mainly played for Execration and Neon in the last few years. What awaits the team in this league is difficult to say, as it is their first appearance in the Asian elite, but the team should not become the whipping boys.

A glance at the standings now sees the Execration squad in the top three in SEA with a 2-1 record. But it should be borne in mind that the Filipinos have only met their direct rivals so far and today is their first serious clash against what I reckon is the team with the highest level of skill, SMG.

Team Execration is no longer the same team at the Kyiv major and amazed the whole public with their decent game. The squad continues to be made up solely of Filipino players, who move from team to team in the Asian region.

The team's old-timers are 4th and 5th position scorers BDz and RR, who have been with Execration for over a year. Bob and Raging Potato joined the team in the summer of 2021. The latter was replaced before the last BTS by Tino. Another recruit this autumn was Abat. So both of the new signings were just getting used to the new team and the new teammates. But the ninth season of the Asian BTS team failed, so there were two more replacements:

Nando is the main DPC starting carry.

The old Philippine teammate is back.

The new trio of Kimizu, who have not played in strong lineups before, are also in the squad.

Overall, the Execration team does not look like they will be counting on any big dividends at the end of the season. The main thing for them is to keep their place in the elite. In the first week of the new DPC cycle, the Filipinos played MG.Trust (0-2) but could not put anything past their opponents, losing two maps in 30 minutes. But then they won crucial head-to-head encounters with OB.Neon (2-1) and TNC (2-0) even put the boys in the temporary Top 3, but it should be understood that this team is far from the majors now, and the game with SMG should prove it.

Team SMG understands the importance of this game, so I would like to suggest taking their victory with a handicap (-1.5) on maps for 2.25.

On the first map, a lot of kills will be made, so Total Over 54.5 frags for 1.81 looks like a good option to bet on.