We all doubted them when they benched siuhy, but MOUZ continue to make everyone look really, really dumb.

Through to their third consecutive grand final, after taking down Eternal Fire, it’s looking like those stage jitters have now all gone away.

torzsi dominated the series. The Hungarian is really staking a claim as one of the best AWPers in the world. We’ve always liked him, but it is crazy when you think about how bad dexter made him look.

[insert obligatory dexter joke here]

As for Eternal Fire, the generic chokers narrative is now well and truly attached to them.

Is it fair? Probably not, they’ve only really lost games we’d expect them to lose, but something does need to be said about how XANTARES utterly fell apart in the semi. Eternal Fire aren’t exactly a one-man army – far from it in fact – but you do have to wonder if they may have turned their 13-11, 13-10 losses into a win if their star player had actually bothered to play.

The second semi-final, fought between Vitality and Spirit, was nothing like the first.

A rematch of the IEM Katowice final, although this one was a lot closer than back then. The two teams traded dominant map wins before Vitality managed to close it out in a close last map to book their own third grand final in a row.

It says a lot about how strong Vitality are right now when you look at the scoreboard for map one. ropz had a torrid time, returning just one kill in a T half that saw Vitality build up a 9-3 lead. It didn’t get much better for him in the second half either, but at least he turned up for map three.

donk and sh1ro did all they could. donk had the most kills across both teams in the series, but in a series where everyone outside of stars struggle, the result often comes down to other factors.

In the case of Vitality and their current dominance, that factor is their refusal to play Ancient. In an era when their closest rivals are Spirit and MOUZ who both like the map, that perma ban is now a weapon even more powerful than ZywOo after a 3k on pistol.

That said, it’s still a gap that Spirit can close, and sometimes the firepower of donk and sh1ro will be enough to do that, but we still can’t help but think that a roster move may need to happen if they are to close it for good.