The International 2026: Shanghai venue, dates and format are set

Six months before the first match, The International 2026 has a building, a calendar and a format. Valve, the publisher of Dota 2, announced this week that the 15th edition of the game's world championship will be played at the Oriental Sports Center in Shanghai, with a group stage from August 13 to 16 and a main event from August 20 to 23. Esports Insider, The Esports Advocate and Dot Esports all reported the announcement on Thursday, February 12, 2026.

Sixteen teams will make the trip. Some will be invited directly by Valve, the others will come through qualifiers played in June. Only eight of them will reach the main event, the last four days in which the champion is decided. The winner lifts the Aegis of Champions, the trophy of the tournament.

Esports Insider and The Esports Advocate, February 12, 2026, reporting Valve's announcement.

An arena that already knows esports

The city was known. The building was not. The Oriental Sports Center is an indoor arena that can seat 18,000 people depending on how it is set up, The Esports Advocate wrote. It has hosted top-level esports before: Esports Insider lists the semifinals of the 2017 League of Legends World Championship and, in Counter-Strike 2, the Perfect World Shanghai Major of 2024, alongside traditional sporting events.

It is not the hall the tournament used on its first visit. The International was played in Shanghai once before, in 2019, at the Mercedes-Benz Arena. That year OG won the Aegis for the second time in a row, beating Team Liquid 3-1 in the grand final, Dot Esports recalled. It was the last edition held in China.

Valve has given the venue and the dates, and has stopped there for now. Ticket information will be released later; Esports Insider reports that Valve promised it for the near future.

From June to August: the calendar

The road to Shanghai has four dated stages, and the first two are played long before anyone flies to China.

An open qualifier is a tournament any team may enter, whatever its record. It lasts four days here. The regional qualifiers that follow run for two weeks, and together they decide which teams join the invited ones in Shanghai. A direct invite, by contrast, is a place Valve gives a team without making it qualify.

The group stage and the main event are separated by three days without play, from August 17 to 19. Both stages take place in Shanghai, according to The Esports Advocate.

The shape is the one of last year, moved about three weeks earlier in the calendar. In Hamburg, the Swiss stage ran from September 4 to 7 and the playoffs from September 11 to 14, Esports Insider reported at the time: four days, a three-day break, then four days again.

How a Swiss-style group stage works

All 16 teams start in the group stage, which Valve describes as Swiss-style. In a Swiss system there are no fixed groups. After each round, a team is paired with an opponent that has the same record of wins and losses, so that strong teams meet strong teams as the stage goes on and nobody plays every other entrant.

The format is one year old at this tournament. Valve introduced it for The International 2025, replacing the traditional group stage of earlier editions, and Esports Insider detailed it on April 2, 2025. That version had five rounds, played as best-of-three series, which means the first team to win two games takes the series. The three teams that reached four wins went straight to the playoffs. Teams that reached four losses were eliminated. The ten that remained played one more elimination round, the best-ranked against the lowest-ranked, and its five winners completed a playoff bracket of eight.

Valve explained its reasoning in its blog post at the time. The changes were made, Esports Insider quoted it as writing, so that every match would have stakes.

For 2026, the reports of February 12 give the outline and no more: a Swiss-style stage of four days, 16 teams at the start, eight at the end. The number of rounds and the way the last places are decided have not been restated for this edition.

The main event is a double-elimination bracket, a format in which a team is out of the tournament only after its second defeat. A team that loses once drops to a lower bracket and can still reach the final. In 2025, every playoff series was a best-of-three except the grand final, a best-of-five won by the first team to take three games.

What Valve has not said yet

Three points that shape a team's season are still open.

The first is the number of direct invites. The International 2025 had eight of them, Dot Esports noted, against six in 2024, and Valve has not confirmed which figure applies this year. Fewer invites mean more places for teams coming out of the regional qualifiers. The outlet expects the invited teams to be named close to the start of the qualifiers.

The second is how the qualifier places are shared between regions. None of the three reports gives a number per region.

The third is money. The announcement carries no prize pool. For scale, the 2025 edition paid out more than US$2.7 million, according to Esports Insider.

A return to Asia after four editions

The choice of Shanghai itself dates from last year. Gabe Newell, Valve's president, revealed it on September 14, 2025, during the grand final of The International 2025 in Hamburg. Before the new champion was crowned, he thanked the German public and said that the next edition would return to a previous location, Esports Insider reported.

Since its 2019 visit to Shanghai, the tournament has been to Bucharest, Singapore, Seattle, Copenhagen and Hamburg, the same outlet listed. Team Liquid won in Copenhagen in 2024 and Team Falcons in Hamburg in 2025, The Esports Advocate recalled. The 2026 edition is the first in Asia since Singapore in 2022.

Esports Insider wrote at the time that the community had welcomed another edition in Asia after several held in Europe in recent years. The outlet explained those European hosts by the region's record: Europe is the most successful region of the Dota 2 scene, it noted.

A report from Jiefang Daily, published in English by the Shanghai city government on September 17, 2025, added that Shanghai becomes the only city outside Seattle to host the event more than once. It also quoted Perfect World Esports, the company that operates Dota 2 in China, as saying it would draw on its experience and bring its resources together for the event.

The Hamburg final gave the announcement a particular echo in China. Team Falcons beat Xtreme Gaming, a Chinese team, 3-2. The last Chinese champion of The International remains Wings Gaming, in 2016, Dot Esports pointed out, a wait the outlet measures at nearly a decade.

The audience the event brings with it

Shanghai receives a tournament whose audience grew last year. The International 2025 reached a peak of 1,784,879 viewers during its grand final, according to figures from Esports Charts, a firm that measures esports audiences, reported by Esports Insider on September 15, 2025. That was 271,002 more than the 1,513,877 of the 2024 final between Team Liquid and Gaimin Gladiators. The average audience rose as well, from 466,427 to 581,031 viewers, and the event passed 63 million hours watched over more than 108 hours of broadcast, against more than 54 million hours over 117 hours a year earlier. On Twitch alone, the peak passed 1.2 million viewers.

Those numbers made the 2025 edition the third most watched Dota 2 event on record by peak audience. The two ahead of it are the 2021 edition and the 2019 edition, the one played in Shanghai. The last edition held in Asia, Singapore in 2022, peaked at 1.75 million viewers, Esports Insider added in its report of February 12.

Within Dota 2, nothing else came close in 2025. The same figures put the next two events of the year, the Dota 2 tournament of the Esports World Cup and DreamLeague Season 25, at peaks of 429,568 and 416,220 viewers.

The next dates to watch

The calendar now runs in one direction. The Open Qualifiers begin on June 9, the Regional Qualifiers on June 15, and the last qualified team will be known by June 28. Before that, Valve has to name the teams it invites and say how many places each region plays for.

The 16 teams then open the group stage in Shanghai on August 13. Eight of them will still be playing when the main event starts at the Oriental Sports Center on August 20, and the 15th champion of The International will be crowned on August 23.

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