Well, it’s been an interesting week so far in the BLAST world.
Four series into the European branch of the Spring Showdown, CPH Flames have ended their series winning streak at six, including their three straight wins at the RMR last week, and NIP claimed a somewhat surprising victory over the Bad News Eagles amid questions circulating about Dev1ce.
ENCE claimed a pretty narrow 2-1 victory over the Flames on Wednesday, on the back of a brilliant showing by Spinx. The Israeli ended the series with a 71-43 KD and 1.45 rating. Spinx wasn’t the only one who played well, with four players ending with over a 1.0 rating.
Their next game will be against Heroic, who clinched a spot in the semifinal with an easy win over NKT, a roster that many fans probably didn’t remember had clinched a spot in this tournament a few months back.
That’ll be an interesting matchup, given both ENCE and Heroic have looked pretty decent, if not amazing, at points of 2022.
On the other side of the bracket, Bad News Eagles suffered a loss to NIP despite strong performances in all three maps. a 16-7 first map wasn’t enough momentum for the mostly Kosovo-based roster, who went into the half on map two with an 11-4 lead and then gave up a 12-1 second half.
REZ, Brollan, and Plopski all put up strong performances with a 1.5 rating map from each and a total rating over 1.15 by all three. sinnopsyy, who put up a crazy 2.0 in the first map, was unable to help the Eagles win on Ancient or Inferno.
In the last quarterfinal, Astralis took on the Movistar Riders and made a pretty good meal of them. Neither map was a blowout but any series where k0nfig ends with a 1.53 rating and blameF ends with a 1.46 is unlikely to be lost