Experience trumps all

The stage reveals all.

When the lights are brightest, some crumble and some level up. Things got hairy for both teams in NAVI vs Eternal Fire, but the experience of NAVI overcame.

Lots of credit will go the way of w0nderful, and rightfully so. The man who replaced s1mple embodied and incarnated the Undertaker, as he swanned around Mirage and Inferno collecting multikills like Ash Ketchum collects small animals.

NAVI’s rifle core started out quiet, but jL and b1t both won some massive clutches down the stretch - and that’s what made the difference. NAVI won seven clutches to Eternal Fire’s one, and had significantly fewer opening kills, but just held their nerve on stage.

It was a genuinely heartbreaking moment for Eternal Fire, and not least MAJ3R, who had an exceptional series in front of his family in the front row, but just fell short.

Counter-Strike is a game of millimetres, and split seconds, and Eternal Fire fell agonisingly short.

But for NAVI, it’s a proof of concept. This team can win, it can go deep in tournaments, and in w0nderful they have a genuine star who can carry games. He is quickly becoming one of the hottest properties in world Counter-Strike, and this was his biggest showing yet.

Watch out.

Weirdos on stage (we don’t mean G2)

Apparently there was a Counter-Strike game to be played amid the scrap.

Honestly, we don’t remember much of it.

G2 were dominant on Inferno, with HooXi - yes, that HooXi - taking Banana consistently on both sides of the map, and without map control MOUZ struggled to stop NiKo and the IGL from rolling over them.

HooXi is just a stage player, it seems. And MOUZ crumbled.

We feel quite sorry for him, actually. On any other day he’d be the main focus of the story, but at 7-5 some skin site weirdos decided to take a stand against one of the other skin sites (we could look up what the beef is about, but who cares, realistically).

They stormed the stage, forcing security to step in and remove them, but disrupted the game for about half an hour and managed to break the trophy. Bunch of morons.

We’re not really ones to cast dispersions on other people’s intelligence, for obvious reasons, but if you’re going to protest G2 partnering with a skin site, you might want to at least storm their side of the stage, you halfwits.

When play resumed, it felt like MOUZ were a bit shaken, and it ended in a bit of an anti-climatic 13-6 win to G2. Well, as much as a m0NESY game can; he noscoped someone through a smoke in the last round, just to try and bookend a bizarre series with something great.

That was interesting.

The big dog games

Today’s first game is CSGORoll v…

It is, of course, a real nuclear banger between two teams who have actual reason to fight. Virtually, at least. The reigning champions take on the uncrowned kings of Antwerp, as Team Vitality get their shot at toppling FaZe.

Or vice versa. Both teams are giants, and it stands to reason that whoever wins that game is probably the favourite in the grand final regardless. It’s ZywOo vs broky. It’s apEX vs karrigan. It’s flameZ and Spinx vs ropz and frozen. It’s gonna go OFF.

We actually cannot wait. We’re counting down the hours. The minutes. The seconds.

And just as that’s done, there’s another big, big game.

NAVI sit on the brink of a Major final that felt out of reach not long ago - at least for everyone but iM. Which is a crazy sentence, by the way. In their way stand a G2 team that seems to be driven by divine intervention, fairy dust and some incredible individual ability.

Both teams will think this is an incredible shot at making the grand final, and they’re both probably right. G2 mechanically, individually are better - but NAVI are resilient and very hard to put away.

w0nderful was god yesterday, but playing against m0NESY is a completely different animal.

That one could go either way, and given G2’s games to this point, literally anything could happen - and we don’t mean within the realms of Counter-Strike laws. There could be a meteor strike or something if they start going down in rounds.

This TL;DR was written by aizyesque and
Welshy coded the email.

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