The sun has set on the IEM Katowice play-ins and really, despite intrigue surrounding several teams due to stand-in situations, most of the qualifier went about how it was expected to.
FaZe, despite having a substitute in the form of jks, claimed solid wins over Sprout and Mouz that saw them advance without too much fanfare. Likewise OG came off of their strong Blast groups performance into a pair of wins over Renegades and ENCE to qualify.
One of the bigger surprises of the week was the Copenhagen Flames, who despite being ranked 18th in the world, I’m not sure I’d ever watched until this week. They claimed a win over fnatic and then a 2-0 over NIP in order to advance in a surprisingly easy fashion.
Speaking of fnatic...oh fnatic. It should be noted that, miraculously, they did qualify, but losing 16-7 to the Flames probably wasn’t a thing they were super hoping to do this week. smooya getting less than a 1.0 rating over the six maps they played is also not a great sign for them, despite high hopes.
fnatic is not, however, the biggest disaster. At the risk of a swarm of angry fans, it would be hard for a team to look worse than MiBR did.
0-3 on the week, one of the first teams eliminated, going out on a loss to Movistar Riders of all teams. None of those are facts that the Brazilians wanted to be true this week and yet they all are.
To add insult to injury, only one of their players had above a 1.0 average, and that was JOTA. Two of their players, Tuurtle and WOOD7, were in the .7s.
Mouz and NIP, while also making the playoffs, both seemed somewhat uninspired at times; NIP lost to the aforementioned Flames before solidly beating Movistar to advance, while Mouz and standing JDC lost a series to FaZe before beating Entropiq.
All in all, not one of the most surprising qualifiers ever, but that sets the tone for the group stage.
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