Evil Geniuses Win the $18 Million International Dota 2 Championships

I wish I could say I came up with the idea of referring to a group of kids who won a video game tournament with an $18 million prize pool as evil geniuses—but I cannot take the credit. That is just their team's name. And they did just do that—Evil Geniuses, the North American team in this year's International Dota 2 Championships, won the blockbuster video game tournament which went on for four days.

This is the first time that the North American team has competed in the International finals, although Evil Geniuses placed third place in last year's competition. There was some high drama when two of the best players left of the prestigious e-sports team (one leaving to join another group of Dota 2 players commonly known to as "dream team").

But the Evil Geniuses brought on a 15-year-old "prodigy," Syed "Sumall" Hassan, who helped the team win the Dota 2 Asia Championships. (At that point, Hassan had won over $500,000 in prize money, Polygon reports.)

And while many considered Evil Geniuses had less than 50% shot at winning against their opponents—the Chinese team CDEC—Sumall and the gang proved everyone wrong, beating another Chinese team in a lower bracket final 2-0 thanks to some fancy footwork from team captain Peter "PPD" Dager before demolishing CDEC in the final round 3-1.

With that, the North American team came out on top, and according to Polygon, will bring home $6.8 million of the overall prize pool. Welcome home, boys.