Ballerpoker.com sponsors a new Defense of the Ancients league, called the DotA Ballers League.

This is an international league open for teams from any country.

The spokesman of Ballerpoker.com has this to say about their tournament. "Our intention is to help out RTS players to become good poker players and being able to earn money out of it. We do this because we know that good strategy players have the basic skills to become good poker players as well."

He continues to explain the connection between RTS players and poker. "This has been shown many times with thousands of RTS pros are doing very well in the poker circuit. And with our help we believe we can produce more poker professionals
through having coaching videos, hand discussions, poker strategy articles easy accessible and the best rakeback offers for our members."

This tournament features a $2,000 prize money on top of the 80% of the entrance fees collected during signups.

UPDATE: DotA Ballers League removes entry fee.

Here's the official statement from the organizers.

From today all members of The Gaming League will be able to apply for one of the best dota leagues in the world without paying the entry fee!

Fee removal was resulted by obvious lack of interest from community to play on professional level and therefore we will reduce number of teams accepted from unlimited to 32 teams that will be picked on basis of written applications that teams that wish to participate should send to: justdota@thegl.eu.

Dota Ballers league comes with $2000 prizemoney and as such offers a good opportunity for many Dota teams to earn their title of proffesional gamers.

The application period starts today, January 17th and will last for two weeks (2) until January 31st 2008.

All the teams that wish to participate should send an email to justdota@thegl.eu containing following information:

Team ID (at thegl.eu):
Team name:
Participating players:
Team website:

GG Client ID's:
Short statement on topic: "What would your team bring to Dota Ballers League"

Here's more information about the upcoming tournament:

Format:
Groups, then top 2 proceed to a single elimination best-of-three bracket.

Scheduling matches:
There will be 2 matches for each team per week. The dates will be discussed between both the team captains and an admin. After a game is scheduled a team cannot postpone it so be careful about the dates. Each teamleader will add the admin responsible for his group in MSN/ICQ for coordination.

If 2 teams have the same score the team that won the direct game proceeds, if 3 teams have the same score
there will be a rematch between those 3 teams in a best-of-one mode.

Prize money:
Prize money will be 2000$

The full rules of the tournament can be found here.

Link:
Official Statement