The faithful shall be rewarded. Movistar Riders came into the week with the expectation that they would be a middle team in Group C, hopefully scraping by into a top-three placement.
To be fair, they did get a top three placement. But they ended up doing much, much better than expected. Movistar became the first team in ESL pro league’s groups this year to win all five of the games that they played.
In a group that looked pretty open to begin with, Movistar quickly claimed a good position with wins over Godsent and Players in their first two games. Beating one of the best teams in the group set them up well for the second half, where they claimed wins over Liquid, BIG, and Party Astronauts en route to their perfect record.
Perhaps most interesting was the fact that Movistar rarely won dominantly. The only 2-0 they achieved was against BIG. Even Party Astronauts, who ended the group 0-5, managed to take a map.
The Rider’s best player over the week was SunPayus, who ended the week with a 1.17 rating while Alex had a 1.14. Both players were instrumental to their team’s unbeaten record, but all five ended with a rating of above 1.0.
Despite Players’ loss to the Riders, they still performed well; that was their only loss in the group and they claimed an easy second place on the back of 1.37 rating by Sh1ro and a 1.25 by HObbit.
If those two players keep performing at that level, this roster is going to be really scary heading into playoffs.
Rounding out the top three was NA’s second-to-last hope, Team Liquid. Despite losses to both Players and Movistar, they won their other three maps and made it across the line just ahead of the 2-3 BIG, 1-4 Godsent, and 0-5 Party Astronauts.
Now, the last group awaits with NAVI, Heroic, Astralis and EG. Read on for more.
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