If you want to watch the Dota 2 International Championship, here's how you can do it

This week, Valve kicks off the main event of TI5, the fifth International Dota 2 championship, and there are plenty of ways to watch.

The easiest way is in the Dota 2 client itself, which has a dedicated watch tab and which allows you to select any of the casters for the game and their viewpoints. But for people watching away from Dota 2, there are a number of other options. TI5 is streaming on Twitch, of course, where you can find multiple language streams, and where you'll find some excellent analyst coverage between games.

This year Valve has also greatly enhanced their own Dota TV web client, which provides the same analyst and caster content as Twitch's streams, but also offers complete in-game stat tracking in real-time with each stream, including player positions, rankings, performance, item purchases and more.

TI5 is also bringing back a valuable resource for Dota 2 novices introduced last year: the Newcomer Stream, a cast specifically tailored to entry level viewers to help them understand what they're seeing and why certain plays and decisions are important — or disastrous. While not every game will have a Newcomer cast, there will be at least one Best of Three per day featuring this commentary.

TI5 features teams from all over the world competing for a prize pool that currently sits at $18 million and continues to grow, based on crowd-funding and in-game purchases. For a primer on how to watch competitive Dota 2, check out our video below.