Last Sunday, October 4, the final game of ESL Pro League S12 Europe received a wide viewership of more than 500K spectators, which turned the tournament into one of the most popular online esports events. The NAVI-Astralis match ended in the Danish team’s victory. On the one hand, such an outcome might seem surprising, for NAVI entered the final stage with an advantage of one map. On the other hand, during the tournament, the Danish have been proving themselves to be strong participants.
Just to put it into context, the championship kicked off on September 1, with sixteen teams competed for a prize fund of $450,000. Throughout the competition, Astralis was defeated only twice – by Heroic in the quarterfinals and by Complexity in the group stage. NAVI, in their turn, gained six victories in the first stage and made it into the final from the upper bracket.
In the grand final, the first map was picked by NAVI, and given previous results, their victory appeared to be evident. However, Astralis started to come back on the second map, and, gaining the lead, these Danish guys won 3 maps at a run and seized the victory! Thus, over the course of CS:GO history, Astralis became the second team managed to win back in the best-of-5 series final starting with a 0:2 score!
That way, the breakdown of the overall prize pool is as follows:
