This article was originally published on GameSpot's sister site onGamers.com, which was dedicated to esports coverage.

　　The Dota 2 Champions League finals that were due to be played at the end of the 2013 will now commence later today after a number of delays due to scheduling conflicts such as Speed Gaming.int being away in China for the G-League 2013 at the end of last year and Alliance in Las Vegas for the D2CL Season 4 finals earlier this month.

　　Both teams topped their respective groups which advanced them directly to the semifinals where Alliance beat Team Liquid 3-0 in the best of five series and Speed Gaming.int beat Sigma.int 3-1 in their best of five series.

　　The base prize pool is set at $50,000 with first place prize netting themselves $25,000 and second place $15,000. The Dota TV ticket is also helping to boost the prize pool however we haven't had final confirmation yet of how much extra revenue has been raised to increase the prize pool.

　　

The Schedule

The best of five Grand Finals series will be casted by Toby 'TobiWan' Dawson on the D2CL Dailymotion channel at the following times.

　　

PST	EST	GMT	CET	SGT
09:00	12:00	17:00	18:00	01:00

The Teams

Alliance

Off the back of the Christmas break January has been a pretty quiet month for Dota 2 in terms of the amount of tournament matches going on, Alliance's latest appearance was at the D2L Season 4 offline finals earlier this month in Vegas where they were joined by Fnatic and the Eastern giants Vici Gaming plus LGD.cn. Another difficult tournament for Alliance saw them lose their semifinals match against Vici Gaming 2-1 dropping them down to the first round of the lower bracket where they once again met Fnatic who also defeated them 2-1.

　　The poor result at Vegas for the International 2013 champions is another example of how much the team has been struggling to perform at offline events, towards the end of last year we saw Alliance attend a number of events such as MLG Columbus, DreamHack and EMS One Fall with their highest result across all these offline events being a 3rd place position at DreamHack. However their online performance has netted them more success with the Star Ladder Season 8 group stage finishing with the team at the top of standings on an impressive score of 13-4. Another notable victory was the online finals for the 2013 Fragbite Masters that was played out at the end of last year in which they defeated Fnatic 2-1.

　　Alliance will want to prove they still have what it takes to achieve victory on 6.79 and recreate the spark that powered them off to a flying start at the beginning of last year.

　　

Alliance vs Liquid

Below you can find the VODs for all of Alliance's D2CL matches.

　　Game 1

　　Game 2

　　Game 3

　　

Speed Gaming.int

This will be the first major Western tournament match for Speed Gaming.int since the return from trip to China where they spent the majority of December competing in the G-League 2013 and Fengyun tournaments. Their G-League performance saw them advanced through the group stage in second place after defeating Titan and Vici Gaming however during the round of six playoff stage they were unable to defeat LGD.cn or TongFu, two of the biggest Eastern teams and as a result were dropped out of the tournament.

　　After losing in the G-League the team was scheduled to return home and then take part in the D2CL finals in early January instead the team decided to extend their stay over seas and take part in the Fengyun tournament unfortunately their participation was cut short after losing out in the round of 16 single elimination stage once again against TongFu.

　　The last time the team faced off against Alliance was all the way back in November during MLG Columbus` round robin stage where they lost to Alliance in the best of one series which was during the first day where Speed were suffering from jetlag and heavy delays, other than that it has been a fair while since the two sides met each other and should make for a very interesting grand finals.

　　Speed Gaming.int will be looking to recreate their success from MLG Columbus and pick up another tournament win on the Western side of the scene.

　　

Sigma.Int vs Speed Gaming

Below you can find the VODs for all of Speed Gaming.int's D2CL matches.

　　Game 1

　　Game 2

　　Game 3

　　Game 4

　　

The Rares

For those of you who enjoy the gambling of Rares or even the gambling of Keys now then you will be interested to know that the Dota 2 Lounge community currently favours Alliance 65% over their rivals Speed Gaming.int. Previous records show that Alliance are currently 6-2 over Speed Gaming.int in competitive matches however only two of these matches were played on 6.79 and in the currently form it's hard to pick a favourite between these two. A cheeky Rare or two on Speed may just net you a small victory.