First things first. Eight team tournament with six team playoffs?

That’s woke.

Realistically, it doesn’t really matter; the ‘lower bracket final’ games are simply rebranded as quarter-finals, albeit Group A vs Group B lower bracket. This surely will have no negative effect on who makes it to the semi-finals. Surely.

With only two teams out at this stage, you have to properly mess up to be out already, or just be the worst team at the event. TYLOO are probably the worst team at the event, but The MongolZ?

We have concerns.

Senzu’s untimely departure was always going to be tough to deal with, but it seemed like controlez might be alright and the transition might be quite smooth. Instead, it seems like that foreboding burst of energy people get just before they depart their mortal coil.

That was morbid. But we had to watch them lose to Passion UA, and that didn’t exactly make us feel alive.

They also lost to Spirit, who were in the lower bracket having spluttered to a loss against Falcons. Falcons are a very good team, but probably not quite the absolute best team in the world Spirit insist on making them look like. donk just cannot kill NiKo, and it’s not obvious why.

On the other side, predictably, FURIA beat paiN, Vitality took down TYLOO (both with a map loss, however) and paiN beat TYLOO. FURIA once more toppled Vitality to move on to the semi-finals.

Basic stuff.

This does, though, mean Vitality drop to the quarter-finals, and will play Spirit at 11:30 CET.

Vitality are not exactly in red-hot form and even in wins of late have looked shaky, fallible and underwhelming; while Spirit have some issues around their T sides and can’t seem to find a consistent style to get the best out of their third and fourth men.

Sounds like two bad teams. Fortunately, that game comes after the real show, Passion UA vs paiN.

A game we will absolutely be getting up at 9AM to watch. What do you think we are, casuals?