Welcome my dear readers, to the first segment of this most excellent series: Gambit's View. In these posts I will pontificate, prognosticate, equivicate and otherwise explicate my thoughts on the teams going to the grandest Dota 2 tournament of them all, The International.

It goes without saying that I am, at least among the more plebian dotanoobs, considered to be no Dota scholar, but I hope you will bear with me and correct me, should the need arise.

So, without further verbosity, pomposity or thesaural abuse, I give to you:
Alliance - The Swedish Jewel of the Western scene.

Strengths and Weaknesses
S4 is one of the best mids in the game, and can dominate the game if put up against a weaker hero mid.
AdmiralBulldog is extremely competent at a few heroes (NP, bounty and Lone Druid), but doesn't have the range that other #3's have
Loda has, in my opinion, not been as efficient or stable as other carry players, but has adapted well to a more aggressive style of carry lately.

Strategy-wise Alliance seem to favor having the option to split push, with a strong emphasis on a secure late game, often picking 2 carries to achieve exactly that.

What to expect:
Nature's Prophet in most games if he's not banned .
Late game/Pushing hybrids with a strong early game that can take towers, relatively weaker mid game and strong lategame with dual carries.
This plays into their strengths as they have good aggressive supports (Akke and EGM) and carry players who favor heroes that need a large amount of gold to be effective.

Watch out for:
AdmiralBulldog's courier sniping, daring Roshan attempts and Loda attempting to throw yet again (see Zenith at last year's International)

So what do you think? Does Alliance have what it takes? Is Sweden, in fact, the best esports country in the world?

Strengths: Being Swedish, which infinitely increases skill level in any e-sport.

Also Akke chen aint nothin to fuck wit.

I think Alliance's big thing is Loda's experience with pretty much every strategy that has ever existed. Loda has played with so many weird strats and we've already seen Alliance pull some of those out of the bag with great success. Being able to throw curveballs is important against the highly disciplined Asian teams.

Alliance have the skill and the creativity to go far in the international, and they definitely have the potential to go far in the tournament.

Unless it's Starcraft...

That aside, I think the Alliance are a great team, but I don't see them going extremely far. S4 is key to their team succeeding, as Loda gets too caught up in farming sometimes. Their support players are decent, but I will admit they've been playing excellent recently.

Still better than you guys!

at least we didn't get our hopes up, in our home country, in front of my countrymen...

True true, an American hasn't reached an MLG final in years

BECAUSE FALLENELF HAS REALLY DROPPED THE BALL ON THE PROPER RESPONSE TO THESE SLIGHTS AGAINST OUR GREAT NATION

Yup, that's perfect.

Did you break my link?

Typical Swede - needs an American to fix their HTML!

I am a strong beautiful Swede that dont need no murican

FIXED