The International 2025 will feature a Swiss Stage

The International will look a little different this year. The premier Dota 2 competitive event won't quite be following in the footsteps of its predecessors, as it will be the first to feature a Swiss Stage element over its first three days.

In this part of the tournament, known as The Road to The International, 16 teams will face off in best-of-three matches against others with the same record where any team who notches up four victories will progress to the main event. After five rounds, there will be three qualified teams for a fact and three teams who are heading home, with the remaining 10 sent into a special elimination round to find five more winners and five more losers.

As for why Valve is incorporating this, we're told: "We set out this year to create a structure such that every single match had stakes, and that those stakes were clear to the teams and the viewers. We wanted to do this without losing the massive amount of foundational, tournament-meta-defining games that fans of the group stage enjoy every year. And at the same time, the new format needed to avoid issues we've seen in previous years, where individual round robin games didn't matter at all, or only mattered to teams that weren't in the match."

The Road to The International will start on September 4, with the main event planned for the week afterwards from September 11. This will all happen at the Barclays Arena in Germany.