Eric Oliveira

Team Liquid has always been a powerhouse but seems to be going through a crisis since the retirement of Aydin "Insania" Sarkohi. After a string of inconsistent results and struggling to find equilibrium with their new roster, Liquid failed to qualify to the ESL Birmingham 2026.

Defense of the Ancients (DotA) is the original multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) that began as a Warcraft III custom map. Over time, this acronym became synonymous with an entire genre and competitive ecosystem.

Dota 2 is always getting small updates, and one of them was pushed recently, changing the high-demand roles in Ranked Role Queue (RRQ). These high-demand roles used to be hard support and soft support ever since this type of queue was introduced, but now they have been changed to hard support and off lane.

We are back with the Strafe Recommends series, and 2026 starts with Maurice “KheZu” Gutmann and his excellent YouTube channel, also called KheZu. He began his professional career as a Heroes of Newerth (HoN) player. His first notable team was DmSn/KD, where he played alongside another well-known Dota 2 name: Aydin “iNSaNiA” Sarkohi.

After delivering underwhelming results during the last trimester of 2025, Chinese teams went through a big Chinese shuffle during Christmas.