Four teams had a chance to play their bo3s today. For some, it was an opportunity to secure the playoffs. Others fought for their tournament lives. As the dust settles, two teams emerged victorious tonight: Team Heretics and Nordavind.
Game 1: Syman Gaming vs Team Heretics (0-2)
In yesterday’s preview, we mentioned the likelihood of this game being close. Two competitive teams with formidable players. Well, we couldn’t have been further away from the truth on map 1. Vertigo came up and as all the players arrived on the 51st floor, Heretics started on T side and Syman Gaming on the CT side. Due to the nature of this map, many are willing to call it a T sided map. That’s why you expect to see most of the rounds to be won on that side. What you don’t expect is for it to be incredibly one-sided. Heretics destroyed their opponents. They had such a dominant performance that even multiple knife kills came in. Syman won only 1 round and lost Vertigo 16-1.
Momentum was high in the Heretics camp. As we made it to Overpass, it looked like a repeat of Vertigo. The CT side of Heretics managed to win round after round. Blink, and you could have missed how quickly the Frenchmen massed 7 rounds on the defensive. However, those last few rounds were post-plant situations. One of which was a 3v3 and a 1v1. Finally on the 8th, Syman managed to not only crack open a bombsite, but defend it from a CT retake. It was imperative to win the round as this caused economic turmoil for the CT’s. What came next was a flurry of rounds from Syman. Not only did they managed to win the last 8 rounds of the half, but the streak continued well into the CT side. All was looking well for Syman as they managed to reach 14. Their opponents began making a comeback and reached 13 rounds. Round 28th was won by Syman with just the AWP of Rustem “mou” Telepov and a few pistols. The very last round was a Glock clutch by Lucky. Thus, the game went to overtime, but even here it became a very close race. Syman was once again in the lead 18-17, but Heretics were able to put us into the second set of overtime. Finally, the Frenchmen managed to win with the necessary four rounds and won the bo3 2-0.
Game 2: SMASH vs Nordavind (0-2)
Just like in the previous bo3, SMASH was unable to field Sebastian “NEEX” Trela. From what we can gather, it seems that NEEX had to replaced due to some injury, and this meant they had to look for another stand-in. It was Jacob “pyth” Mourujärvi who responded to the call of action, and he tried to help SMASH obtain a victory. Even though the intentions were good and SMASH had a decent showing, Nordavind’s Jesper “TENZKI” Plougmann had an incredible game on the map. His team managed to best SMASH on T side of Overpass. Nordavind did, however, have some issues trying to close out the map, as SMASH cunningly got on their heels. However, in the end, Nordavind managed to pull through with a 16-12 victory on Overpass.
Next on the list was Inferno. This was SMASH’s map pick where they had a varying degree of results. Coming out strong, SMASH managed to secure the early pistol round and a 3-0 start. But things just went down-hill from there. Not a single round was picked up by SMASH moving forward. Throughout the entirety of the first half, the bomb was planted once, and that’s it. Even if they acquire the initial opening frag, that wouldn’t be enough. It didn’t help that TENZKI continued his performance and had another barn burner of a game, getting 55 kills across two maps.
