Falcons beat Xtreme Gaming to win The International 2025
Team Falcons defeated Xtreme Gaming in a five-game grand final in Hamburg to win The International 2025 and lift the Aegis of Champions. Analysis. Details.
Team Falcons defeated Xtreme Gaming in a five-game grand final to win The International 2025 in Hamburg. The victory delivered the Aegis of Champions after a demanding tournament run in which Falcons played ten series and recorded only three sweeps.
Xtreme Gaming pushed the last match to its full length. Falcons therefore had to win the tournament through repeated adaptation, not by carrying one dominant draft through a short final.
The champions won through a long route
Dota best-of-five finals expose shallow preparation. A strategy that succeeds once can be banned, countered or denied by side selection later in the series. Reaching a fifth game means both teams have already shown several layers of their tournament plan.
Falcons’ ten-series route provides useful context for the final. With only three sweeps, the roster spent much of the event responding to losses inside series. That experience does not guarantee the last map, but it makes recovery a practised process rather than an emergency improvisation.
Support movement is often hidden beneath the decisive team fight. Our Dota support map guide explains how vision, lane coverage and smoke positioning create the information that lets cores take those fights on favourable terms.
Xtreme Gaming forced the title to game five
The runner-up’s role should not be reduced to providing resistance for the champion’s story. Xtreme Gaming took enough control of the final to demand every available game and kept the Aegis undecided until the end.
For Falcons, winning in that setting turned a strong era into a permanent line in Dota history. The Aegis records the team that solves the complete tournament, including the series where its first plan fails.
Valve’s official champions article recounts the Hamburg final and the route to the trophy. The current strategic environment has since moved on; our report on Patch 7.41e and the Summer Scrub should be used for present-day mechanics rather than projecting the 2025 final forward.
Source: Valve, official Dota 2 news.
Editorial note
Facts and mechanics were checked against the linked primary sources before publication.
This article was reviewed on August 6, 2026.

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