American Showdown Finals
We had both semifinals unfold on the same day and both series were incredibly one-sided. Godsent vs Furia Esports was the first matchup of the day and Furia wanted to finish this series quickly as they stormed the first game. Godsent had the first map pick and decided to go for Overpass, which they regretted quickly.
Furia started with a 5-round lead and they didn’t give it away throughout the first half, which ended with a 12-3 score in favor of Furia on CT. During the second half, Godsent couldn’t handle Furia’s aggression as they could only successfully defend 4 rounds. The final score of the first map was 16-7 and Kscerato had the best performance with a +10 kill differential and 104.3 ADR.
Game 2 was just a bit closer as Godsent had a better CT-side on Nuke during the first half. Furia still had a 3-round lead when the second half arrived and they had no issues mounting a solid defense. Godsent had a glimmer of hope as they won three rounds in a row in the latter part of the half, but it wasn’t enough. Furia managed to close out the game in a convincing fashion with a 16-11 score and securing a spot in the grand finals.
On the other side of the bracket, PaiN Gaming would face MiBR for the last spot in the finals. Vertigo was the first map pick for PaiN and they took every advantage they could in the early game as they managed to win 8 rounds in the first half. MiBR wasn’t able to penetrate PaiN’s defense in the second half and PaiN finished the game with a 6-round lead.
MiBR decided to play the second game on the classic map Dust2. The first half of this game was actually pretty even as it finished with a 7-8 score and it was looking like we could potentially have a 3rd game. But in the second half, PaiN pushed the pedal to the metal and picked up 8 rounds while MiBR was able to win only 2 rounds. Biguzera had the best performance with a kill differential of +13. This result means that PaiN is going to face Furia in a best-of-3 for $20,000 dollars and 1600 BLAST Premier circuit points.
Europe Showdown Finals
If we are being completely honest, this series had a bit of a disappointing result as Ninjas in Pyjamas struggled a lot against Astralis. The first game would be played out in Nuke and the first half was the closes part we had during this series. It was somewhat of a back-and-forth fight where Astralis managed to win 5 rounds in a row, but the half ended on an 8-7 score in Astralis’ favor.
In the second half, Astralis had a much more dominating performance as NiP was only able to win 4 out of the 8 rounds played. This is where the series started to go downhill as we head into the second map, Mirage. Astralis started with a solid defense as they won the first 5 rounds and Ninjas in Pyjamas picked up the 6th round with a bomb plant. But this would be the ONLY round they would win during this match, meaning we had the final score of 16-1 and Astralis would advance into the grand finals.Yesterday we saw ENCE take down Heroic, which means that Astralis will face them in the grand finals where they’ll be competing for a $20,000 dollars and 1600 Circuit points prize and also a spot in the Blast Premier Spring Finals coming in June. Both grand finals will be very exciting to watch as all of the participants come into their respective matches as the definitive best teams in both tournaments.
