It s another stacked weekend in the world of being incredibly good at computer games for money. Coming up tomorrow we ve got high-level Dota 2, Smite, CS:GO, and League of Legends. With the majority of the year s World Championships now done, this is the beginning of the next year of regular season play. If you needed proof that competitive gaming is only getting bigger and bigger, consider that the amount of money on the line this weekend would have set a world record just two years ago.

Dota 2: The Frankfurt Major

Saturday will see the final stages of this official $3m Dota tournament play out in Germany. The lower bracket final will begin at 10:30 local time (09:30 GMT/01:30 PST) to be followed by the grand final at 14:30 CET (13:30 GMT/05:30 PST). At the time of writing, either Team Secret or Evil Geniuses will snag the upper bracket grand final slot. The loser of their match will face either EHOME or OG for the final place. This has been an amazing tournament so far, with lots of different regions and playstyles represented at the very top. You can watch the games on Twitch or on the official Dota 2 streaming site. Don t miss it.

Smite Super Regional

This weekend, the world s best Smite teams will battle for a chance to compete in January s World Championship. The North American and European Championships are running alongside one another, with the third place and wildcard matches taking place on Saturday and the two grand finals on Sunday. This is a young and dynamic competitive scene and a really exciting game to watch: thoroughly recommend checking it out, even if you only tune in for the finals. The show begins at 10.30 EST (15.30 GMT/07:30 PST) on both days, and you ll find the Twitch stream right here.

Counter-Strike: GO at Intel Extreme Masters San Jose

Seven international invited teams plus one qualifier (from last week s iBUYPOWER Cup) take part in a brutal two-day single-elimination bracket. This promises to be top-flight CS:GO with a healthy prize pool, and a good opportunity for US fans to watch games on their own time for the first time since, er, last week. But it s normally less common, honest. Play begins at 19.40 PST on both days, which is 22.40 EST. This creates a bit of an issue for European viewers: Saturday s games will begin at 03.40 GMT/04.40 CET on Sunday and Sunday s at the same time on Monday. That s only fair, mind. Watch the action here.

League of Legends at Intel Extreme Masters San Jose.

As Worlds 2015 fades into memory, rekindle your enthusiasm for competitive League this weekend. As with CS:GO, this is a single-elimination bracket: but unlike CS:GO, the teams ere assembled through a vote in China, Europe and North America plus a single invited KeSPA team, Jin Air Green Wings. The tournament runs concurrently with the CS:GO, so see above for times. Click here for the Twitch stream.

PC Gamer Pro is dedicated to esports and competitive gaming. Check back every day for exciting, fun and informative articles about League of Legends, Dota 2, Hearthstone, CS:GO and more. GL HF!

Mineski were one of the standout underdog success stories of the Frankfurt Major group stage. Having won the Southeast Asian qualifier, the Filipino team arrived in Germany as the top seed for their region and the only country representing the Philippines. In the group stages, they then managed to clinch 2-0 victories over both Alliance and EHOME that surprised everybody—even, apparently, them. This earned them a space in the upper bracket, and when their SEA counterparts Fnatic were eliminated by OG in the first round of lower bracket games they became the sole representatives of their scene at the Major.

Their fortunes at the main event haven't been as good, however. They faced a tough matchup against tournament favourite Team Secret in the first round of the upper bracket, which they lost 2-0. They then lost 2-0 against OG, as the latter continued their dream-ending streak through the lower bracket. Nonetheless, this was an impressive run. Like the Peruvian team Unknown.xiu, Mineski's success testifies to the fact that Dota is a truly international esport, with talent able to break through even in regions that lack the resources and training infrastructure of North America, Europe, and China.

A day after their elimination, I sat down for a chat with Mineski support player JessieVash.

PCG: What's the feeling like in the team at the moment, and for you personally?

JessieVash: It's good. We're still lacking in our practice schedule—we can't practice in the times we want. In the Philippines the teams are... in some practice games, they're not taking it seriously. That's the only problem for my team. We can't practice at the next level.

PCG: You had a really good group stage. How did you feel through those games?

JessieVash: I don't know, that day... we won straight 2-0 Alliance and 2-0 EHOME. We didn't expect to win against even Alliance, it was a surprise. But really we just played our game the way we want, the heroes where we are comfortable.

PCG: What happened coming into the main event? Did you feel more pressure?

JessieVash: Yeah! [Laughs] So much pressure. You can see in the game, the draft, in how we played—it gave pressure to every player on my team.

PCG: Did you feel intimidated by Secret at all?

JessieVash: In the Secret game, we had a chance to beat them. Really, the experience gap—how to end the game when we're the one who has the advantage—we still can't end the game to win.

PCG: That comes back to practice, right?

JessieVash: Yeah.

PCG: Many people, myself included were happy to see an SEA team and a Filipino team in the upper bracket at the main event. Did you feel any additional pressure because of that? Representing your country and your scene?

JessieVash: For me, I always like to represent the Philippines at the biggest events. For Kuku, this is only his second time getting to represent the Philippines.

PCG: This feels like a good patch from a spectator's perspective. How does it feel as a player? Are you happy with the metagame, with the heroes you're playing?

JessieVash: Yeah, but maybe that's why Europe is the one who has the meta now. They always draft some YOLO heroes—strength heroes. In Southeast Asia they play basic—two long-ranged supports. Here, we can see Secret picking four offlane heroes.

PCG: Support Tiny, yesterday.

JessieVash: Yeah, that's why they could pick Huskar—their opponent didn't expect them to pick the Huskar in the last draft. That's the experience gap again I think, for Puppey.

PCG: You did very well against a European team, however—Alliance. Was that different?

JessieVash: I'm not sure if Alliance are still in the top. I see them losing every game... before they played the Majors, they were winning. I think "Alliance is back!" already. I don't know what happened in the Majors games. Even in our game, it wasn't so hard to play against them. I see their skills and I felt that the team could match up against them.

PCG: What about OG? They were much more of an unknown.

JessieVash: In the OG games, we were really pressured by how they draft, how they play. They always pick Miracle- heroes that can carry them if anything happens. Even when they're losing early, we can't win the game.

PCG: We just saw exactly that, right? [This interview took place right after OG vs. Virtus Pro.]

JessieVash: Yeah.

PCG: Personally, then, which game did you most enjoy?

JessieVash: EHOME, I think. EHOME could be the number one team in China, I think. We played against them, I didn't expect to win even one game. We won 2-0!

PCG: Thanks for your time.

PC Gamer Pro is dedicated to esports and competitive gaming. Check back every day for exciting, fun and informative articles about League of Legends, Dota 2, Hearthstone, CS:GO and more. GL HF!

Tonight s upper bracket series between Vici Gaming and Team Secret was crazy. These are two of the world s best teams with some of the very best individual players, and even so the standard was extraordinary. After a close first game that Vici ultimately took command over, Secret brute-forced a 2-1 result in their favour through a mixture of bravado, cheese, and whatever the opposite of tilting is. I'd strongly recommend watching the whole series: the VOD isn't available at the time of writing, but here's the Twitch link anyway.

I don t want to talk about the whole series, though. I want to talk about this:

Gfycat from this thread by redditor /u/handofskadi.

This is one of the most next-level things I have ever seen a Dota player do. It is also, I appreciate, almost completely impenetrable to somebody who hasn t invested time into this strange, brilliant game. For me, it s a reminder of why Dota is so extraordinary and why—despite looking like other games in its ostensible genre—it remains completely unique.

The player you re watching in the gif above is w33 from Team Secret. He s controlling that blue archer lady with the green trail, running back and forth at the top of the stairs. That isn t actually his hero—who is elsewhere—but an illusion of his hero, a duplicate that looks exactly like him but can be controlled separately and has next to no health or damage potential. The semi-transparent dragons and sea monsters and swordsmen running past amount to the entirety of Vici Gaming. Got it? Okay.

At the very highest level of play, the probability space of a given Dota game begins to narrow out. There are very rarely optimal decisions that a player or team can make, but there are certainly logical ones—strategies that teams might be expected to deploy, anticipate from their opponent, and so on. One example of this revolves around the use of Smoke of Deceit.

Every team has a limited (but regenerating) supply of Smoke of Deceit that they can purchase for gold. Using it grants every ally in an AoE a limited period of invisibility, and unlike regular invisibility Smoke of Deceit can t be detected by Sentry Wards or Gems of True Sight. Instead, Smoke invisibility breaks when the user enters a certain radius from an enemy hero—the hero themselves, mind, not any of that hero s pets or illusions or allied creeps.

Good players learn to anticipate a Smoke of Deceit and avoid it. If the enemy is behind or there s an important objective they need to take and they re all suddenly not on the map any more, it s a good time to play safe. Very good players learn to anticipate the direction that a likely Smoke of Deceit attack will come from and avoid that specific area—again, it s a matter of understanding the probability of certain decisions. The best players can anticipate both the timing and direction of a Smoke and actively play against it.

w33 did all of that and then some. He not only anticipated the timing and direction of Vici Gaming s Smoke of Deceit use, he derived a way to do the impossible: to prove without doubt that it was happening long before Secret were in any danger, to reduce the chance that his judgement was wrong to zero.

See, Smoke of Deceit isn t broken by running past enemy units, but the heroes it renders invisible are still physical objects in the world. They still block unit pathing. When w33 found an Illusion rune and spawned two copies of his hero, he used one of them in a completely unique way: he sent it into the enemy jungle, to the top of a flight of stairs that Vici were likely to pass through if they attempted a Smoke of Deceit attack. He then gave the illusion multiple queued movement commands, forcing it to run back and forth at the top of those stairs multiple times. Then he kept an eye on it.

The moment Vici Gaming pass, covered by Smoke of Deceit—that s the transparency effect—they re not revealed by the illusion. But they do cause the illusion s pathing to momentarily fail. It hitches as it hits first iceiceice s Tidehunter and then Fenrir s Winter Wyvern, proving that something has obstructed it even if that something is invisible. You see w33 s green map pings come out shortly after: Vici Gaming are here, and they ve used Smoke.

It s genuinely brilliant, and it s only possible because Dota 2 is fundamentally a game about systems rather than fixed rules. You might come up with rules to help you learn, and rules help you understand the metagame, but the moment somebody decides to break them—when they reach back past the rules to the systems that support them and twist them to their benefit—that s when you get real Dota. And that s why all of the Dota people you know are freaking out about a transparent blue archer momentarily hesitating when it bumps into a half-invisible watermelon man. Esports!

PC Gamer Pro is dedicated to esports and competitive gaming. Check back every day for exciting, fun and informative articles about League of Legends, Dota 2, Hearthstone, CS:GO and more. GL HF!

Dota 2 pro Ravindu "Ritsu" Kodippili has been fired from Cloud9 following allegations that he leaked strategies and information about a rival team to another rival team. As noted by Kotaku and detailed on Reddit, the allegations first came to light last week, when Team Secret player Jacky "EternaLEnVy" Mao tweeted an image of a chat log showing Kodippili sharing information about Digital Chaos with other players in an effort to keep it from qualifying for The Summit 4 tournament.

@ritsudota Ya your a piece of shit pic.twitter.com/km4zRrtjtr

— EternaLEnVy (@EternaLEnVy1991) November 8, 2015

Cloud9 didn't reference the leaks specifically when it announced Kodippili's dismissal, but team captain Theeban "1437" Siva said that "the indiscretions of [Kodippili's] past inevitably lead towards this outcome. His recent efforts to improve his behavior came too late and following our elimination from the Major, it was determined that Cloud9 was no longer the place for him to be."

Cloud9 General Manager Danan Flander echoed that sentiment, adding, "Events preceding the attendance of the Frankfurt Major weighed heavily on both Ritsu and Cloud9 as an organization. His out-of-game conduct was consistently unbecoming of a professional player and although he began taking steps to change himself and how he interacted with the DOTA2 competitive community, his past indiscretions combined were too much for Theeban, myself, and the rest of the organization to overlook moving towards the next Major."

The information that was allegedly leaked would have been gleaned during scrimmage matches between Cloud9 and Digital Chaos, and while sharing secrets apparently isn't against the rules, it is in very bad form. It's another example of bad behavior in professional esports that, unfortunately for Kodippili, the maturing scene is growing less and less tolerant of.