Team Yandex win BLAST Slam VIII over Team Spirit in Malta

Team Yandex won BLAST Slam VIII on Sunday, October 11, coming from a map down to beat Team Spirit 3-1 in the grand final in Attard, Malta. Esports Insider's report of the final, published on October 12, describes a team claiming its second consecutive tier-one title at the start of the 2026-2027 Dota 2 season, and the wire report filed from the venue puts the winner's share at US$270,000 of a US$750,000 prize pool.

The event itself was the eighth edition of BLAST's Slam series, a tier-one circuit the organizer runs through the Dota 2 calendar, and it carried the scene's first full gathering since The International. The run has been building all autumn. Yandex swept through PGL Wallachia Season 9 in Bucharest in late September to take that event's US$300,000 first prize, then defended the BLAST Slam crown they already held from Season VII. The Malta final was the third meeting of the event between Yandex and Spirit, and it settled each of the questions the first two had left open.

Results and prize money from Esports Insider and the wire report from Malta.

How the final turned around

Spirit drew first blood. The reigning International champions took the opening game in a little over 40 minutes, outkilling Yandex 48-19 in a one-sided first map in which Illya "Yatoro" Mulyarchuk's Ursa finished with 19 kills and 12 assists. At that point the series had the shape of a coronation for the team that had won The International 2026 in Shanghai barely a month earlier.

Yandex answered three times. The equalizer came in a game that ran past the 50-minute mark, turned by a teamfight win around the 23-minute mark, and two more Yandex wins closed the series in four. Alimzhan "watson" Islambekov of Kazakhstan finished the four-game series with 50 kills, 12 deaths and 51 assists, the largest single contribution of the comeback.

Three meetings, one trophy

The grand final was the last of three Yandex-Spirit series at the event. Spirit won the first, a 2-1 victory in the seeding round that sent Yandex down into the upper-bracket quarterfinals while Spirit took a bye into the semifinals. Yandex won the second, a 2-0 sweep in Saturday's upper-bracket final that made them the first team through to the grand final and left Spirit to climb back through the lower bracket; the wire report's game logs time that sweep at about 50 and 34 minutes a map, both inside an hour.

Spirit's climb nearly ran out one step short. PARIVISION, the team Spirit had beaten in a five-game International final in September, took the opening game of Sunday's lower-bracket final before Spirit reversed the series 2-1, with Yatoro finishing that comeback at 28 kills, 7 deaths and 21 assists. That earned Spirit the rematch, and the rematch went to Yandex in four. Spirit, for its part, played three series in the Malta bracket and won only the middle one.

The bracket's shape made the final harder to prepare for than most. Spirit played twice on the last day, the lower-bracket final in the early hours of the Malta schedule and the grand final after it, while Yandex had sat through Sunday's first match with the wait of a team that had already done its work. Whether the rest mattered in the games themselves is not a question the scorelines answer; what the record shows is that Spirit won the tournament's opening map of the final and none of the three that followed.

How the event was built

This was the largest Slam BLAST has run. The field grew from twelve teams to sixteen, and the group stage moved from best-of-one matches to full best-of-three series, a structural change the event's preview coverage credited with giving teams more room to show their form before the offline stage. The prize pool, set at US$750,000, is nonetheless down from the US$1 million of earlier editions of the series, and its split is unusual: US$550,000 of it is prize money, while US$200,000 is paid to the teams themselves as earnings, a distinction that shows up in the table below as separate columns for the players and the organization.

The field carried its own stories into the online stage. LGD Gaming rebuilt around two players with long histories in the game, the former International champions Jing "Sneyking" Wu and Syed Sumail "SumaiL" Hassan, according to the event's preview coverage, and the draw put them alongside PARIVISION and Xtreme Gaming in Group A. The format split the field quickly. Only the top two of each group survived the online stage; the other eight teams were eliminated without setting foot in Malta, among them two of Europe's established organizations, Natus Vincere and MOUZ, out in 13th-16th. Yandex's own group had held BetBoom Team, OG and MOUZ; MOUZ was the only one of the four that never reached the Malta bracket, while OG and BetBoom both fell in the early rounds of it. The four group winners, PARIVISION, Aurora Gaming, Team Spirit and Team Yandex, went into the seeding round, where PARIVISION and Spirit won through to the semifinals while Yandex and Aurora dropped into the quarterfinals. That makes Yandex's record over the two weeks unusually clean: a 2-0 group record, one series lost in the seeding round, and four straight playoff wins to close the tournament.

A September to remember

The Malta title completes a stretch of results without a recent parallel in the scene. It began before The International had even finished its aftermath. PGL Wallachia Season 9, the opening tier-one event of the 2026-2027 season, ran in Bucharest from September 19 to 27, and Yandex took it without dropping a playoff series, sweeping Natus Vincere in the grand final. Their status as the defending Slam champions came from Season VII, so the Malta win makes the Slam streak two editions long.

The wider numbers had already pointed the same way before the Malta week began. Esports Charts' quarterly team ranking, published in October, listed Yandex tenth among all PC esports teams for the third quarter at 17.1 million hours watched, the kind of audience that follows a team winning rather than losing. The roster move that underpinned it arrived days before the season's opening event: Ammar "ATF" Assaf joined from Team Falcons, as the magazine reported when the signing was announced in September. The signing joined a core that already included the veteran support Saksa, and it held its place while much of the rest of the scene reshuffled after Shanghai.

Spirit leave with the bigger prize

Spirit's week still has to be read against what they carried into it. The team won The International 2026 in Shanghai, its third Aegis of Champions, by beating PARIVISION 3-2 in a five-game final, and it arrived in Malta without two of the people who built that run: offlaner Magomed "Collapse" Khalilov and long-serving coach Yaroslav "Miposhka" Naidenov have both stepped away from competition, with Batyuk filling the offlane and IllidanSTR taking the coaching seat, according to the event's preview coverage.

PARIVISION's own fortnight frames the runner-up finish from another side. The Shanghai finalist reached the Malta bracket's last day again, took the opening map of the lower-bracket final off Spirit, and left with US$95,000 for third place. Aurora Gaming's fourth place was worth US$65,000.

Even so, the fortnight ends with a pattern worth naming plainly, because the sources name it too. Yandex beat the reigning International champions three times in eight days, once before the playoffs and twice in them, and the last of those wins came after Spirit had shown exactly the resilience that made them champions by fighting through the lower bracket on the final day. The US$135,000 for second place is the smaller half of Sunday's split, but the margin between the teams is now a matter of record: the winners of the season's two tier-one events are the same five players, and the reigning International champions have lost three series to them at a single event.

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