LGD.Forever Young eSports Team Profile

New teams are hardly ever able to achieve great results in the first year of the competitions in any eSports division. However, LGD.Forever Young is not among those teams as they have been very successful since the very first tournament in which they participated. As an organization, LGD was launched back in 2009 and since then, they have become one of the most successful eSports organizations, not only in China, but also in the entire world.

LGD’s first team proved to be very successful as they managed to win SMM 2009 and since then they have been at the very top of Chinese Dota 2. In 2012, LGD announced that they will be making a transition to Dota 2 and that very year they secured their spot at The International 2012. After finishing in the third place, LGD officials announced that they will be launching their second Dota 2 team that they named LGD.int.

The run that LGD.int had was not a long one as the problems in the team caused the team to be disbanded and LGD did not wait a long time to sign a new team which they did in April 2014 when they introduced LGD.CDEC which stands for Chinese Dota Elite Community). This team was rebranded only several months after that and this team became known as LGD.Gaming and they are still the organization’s first Dota 2 team.

LGD.Forever Young History

However, for LGD that was not enough and they wanted another team in the competition. Because of that, in September 2016, LGD announced that they had launched their second Dota 2 team once again and that the name of that team will be LGD.Forever Young. The creation of LGD’s second Dota 2 team was the initiative of Zhang ‘xiao8’ Ning and Yao ‘Yao’ Zhengzheng.

These two players came together and decided that they will form their own team. Eventually, the team was able to sign Luo ‘Lpc’ Puchao, Du ‘Monet’ Peng, and Xie ‘Super’ Junhao. That led them to LGD that eventually decided to sponsor that team and bring them to their organization.

Over the last eleven months, LGD.Forever Young and LGD.Gaming traded players on several occasions but the first player who moved from LGD.Forever Young to LGD.Gaming was Yao. By the time LGD announced the creating of their second team, the competition in that year’s Dota 2 season was already over. Because of that, LGD.Forever Young would have to wait for the start of 2017 to make their debut in Dota 2 competitions.

In January 2017, one of the founding members of the team, xiao8 announced that he will be stepping from the team because he feels tired and he wants to take a break from competitive Dota 2 scene. Because of that, LGD.FY had to look for another player and when Yao moved to LGD.Gaming, LGD.FY was forced to look for two players.

Eventually, Xiao ‘Jixing’ Zhihao would leave LGD.Gaming and join LGD.FY as one of the replacements that the team had in mind for two players that left the team. Besides Jixing, LGD.FY also signed Lei ‘White’ Yipei who was brought in from little know DUOBAO. In April 2017, Leong ‘DDC’ Fat-meng left Vici Gaming after his contract expired and he did not want to extend the contract. Eventually, he would join LGD.Forever Young which meant that White would have to move to the bench.

The last changes in the roster of LGD.Forever Young happened in May 2017 when it was announced that two other members of the original lineup, Lpc and Jixing would be leaving the team. LGD.FY had to react quickly and bring in new players that would adjust very quickly to the style of play that LGD.FY displayed at that time. In the end, He ‘Inflame’ Youngzheng and Tue ‘ah fu’ Soon Chuan joined the team which turned out to be a very good move for this still relatively young team.

Since then, LGD.Forever Young did not make a change in their roster which enabled them to have a very stable team with strongly developed inter-personal relationships between players. Because of that, LGD.Forever Young has achieved some great results since their last change in the roster.

Achievements so Far

Rarely any new team had such a good results as LGD.Forever Young did in their first year of participating in Dota 2 competitions. LGD.FY made their debut in Dota 2 competition in October 2016, when they participated in the Mars Dota 2 League Autumn 2016. They had a relatively good tournament, and finishing in the 5th-6th place in their first tournament was more than a good result.

That same month, they also participated in the Shanghai Dota 2 Open Season where they finished in the fourth place after being defeated in the semi-finals by EHOME. In November of the same year, LGD.Forever young played only one tournament, Dota 2 ACE – Provisional and they once again finished in the 5-8th place. In the last month of 2016, they played at two Dota 2 tournaments and one of those tournaments was the Boston Major.

At the Boston Major, they once again finished in the 5th-8th place but this time they managed to earn $125,000 unlike in their previous tournaments. The second tournament that they played before 2017 was Dota 2 Professional League Season 2 – Top. At that tournament, they faced LGD.Gaming for the first time and they suffered a huge defeat in that match and they eventually finished in the 5th place.

2017 did not start well for LGD.Forever Young because they were able to finish only in the 9th-12th place at the Dota 2 Asian Championship 2017 after they were defeated by iG Vitality, Invictus Gaming’s second team. However, two months after that, LGD.Forever Young was in much better form when they competed at the EPICENTER 2017. In Moscow, they faced Team Liquid in the semi-finals and they were defeated which eventually led them to finish in the 3rd-4th place.

The last big check up for LGD.Forever Young before The International 7 was Mars Dota 2 League 2017 and they managed to reach the final but they were defeated by their sister team, LGD.Gaming. And then came The International and LGD.FY’s amazing performances. LGD.Forever Young topped the group stage of the competition and at the start of the playoffs, many saw them as one of the biggest contenders for the title.

However, after the group stage, LGD.Forever Young had to face Newbee in the upper bracket finals and they would be defeated in that match which meant that they will have to look for their place in the grand finals in the lower brackets. However, there they would face Team Liquid who would eventually win the trophy but LGD.Forever Young had their chance for the win which they failed to use.

Current Roster

LGD.Forever Young’s current roster is one of the most promising rosters in the entire world. Filled with very talented players, LGD.FY could be a force to reckon with already during the next Dota 2 season. Currently, LGD.Forever Young’s lineup features Du ‘Monet’ Peng, Xie ‘Super’ Junhao, He ‘Inflame’ He Yongzheng, Tue ‘Ahfu’ Soon Chuan, Leong ‘ddc’ Fat-meng, and Lei ‘White’ Yipei as a substitute player.

This was the roster that secured the team’s biggest achievement so far by finishing in the third place at The International 7. Interestingly, their sister team, LGD.Gaming finished the tournament in the fourth place and this was one of the rare occasions where LGD.Forever Young was better ranked than LGD.Gaming.

Total Prize Money Won

In a very short period of time, LGD.Forever Young has become one of the most successful teams in China when it comes to the money that they earned from the tournaments’ prize pools. So far, this team has won $2,838,580.14 and almost 95 percent of that income has come from this year’s edition of The International 7.

Besides that, this team has been very lucrative when it comes to securing sponsorship deals. Currently, LGD. Forever Young has sponsorship deals with some very big companies among which are Kingston HyperX, Logandie Food, VPGame, Razer, LENOVO, and several others. LGD. Forever Young has been participating in Dota 2 competitions for less than a year and they have already made a huge impact in the competition.

They are still waiting for their first big title in some Dota 2 competition but if they continue with the level of the game that they displayed at The International 7, they will be winning that trophy very soon.