Don’t you just love it when three out of the four playoff teams at a big event are national lineups? Ten proud countrymen facing off in one of the hotel lobbies of all time to bring glory back home. You just can’t beat that.

Our expectations were low going into the PGL Masters Bucharest 2025, as not a single top-8 team showed up. But to our surprise (and the 21 souls who actually tuned in), it turned out to be a genuinely entertaining event - especially once the Playoffs kicked off.

We got SAW’s yearly underdog run and an absolute banger of a grand final that finally saw the Turks lift a trophy after god-knows-how-many tries. We’re glad they pulled it off - mostly because the Turkish fans would’ve probably set fire to everything in sight if they’d gotten reverse swept.

But first, we must talk about the biggest surprise of the event, SAW.

How does MUTIRIS keep doing it? The man just plucks random Portuguese talent from orgs you’ve never even heard of and builds something much greater than the sum of its parts. After that initial loss to 3DMAX it just clicked, and from that point on there was no stopping them. Some teams learned that the hard way, just ask Liquid. Or maybe don’t, the trauma’s probably still a little too fresh.

In the semis against Legacy, though, it felt like the pressure finally caught up to SAW - especially on Nuke, where they came agonizingly close to reaching the grand final, but just couldn’t finish the job.

Now we’ll probably hear nothing from them until they somehow pop up at the grand final of PGL wherever-the-f-ck 2026.

HEROIC and paiN both went undefeated in the group stage and looked like they were finally bouncing back from a string of disappointing results… but that didn’t last long. Despite nilo and nqz carrying over their strong group stage form, both teams bowed out in the quarterfinals to GamerLegion and Legacy, respectively.

Speaking of GamerLegion, it looks like they’re already practicing the signature NA meltdown ahead of joining 100 Thieves.

Seriously, did they forget to turn their monitors on for the semi against Aurora? There’s just no explaining getting swept with back-to-back 13-1 demolitions and miserable performances across the board. Is it finally time to start calling hypex the Polish kursy?