SLTV Kiev: FaZe stall the Astralis era

The newest edition of SL i-League StarSeries Season, ran by both StarLadder and Chinese tournament organizer i-League, featured sixteen teams battling for the biggest check out of a respectable $300,000 prize. Following a four-day span where all the teams were placed into one group, Swiss-system format, the playoffs featured so many exciting matches. Being the first stacked event after IEM Katowice, many storylines were unfolded during the week of amazing Counter Strike, so let's take a look what happened.

SK and Virtus.Pro pack their bags early

Probably two biggest surprises of the tournament are, once again, Virtus.Pro and SK Gaming. Even though both teams starting the year really well at both E-LEAGUE Atlanta Major and Dreamhack Las Vegas, these two events have launched both teams outside of the top five in the world. With the addition of João "felps" Vasconcellos, SK gaming had a decent start to the tournament, securing wins over both TyLoo and later Virtus.Pro by completely obliterating them on mirage 16-2. That completely broke down the Poles who looked utterly lost and eventually losing to the Swedes NiP (16-5 on nuke) and fnatic (16-2 on inferno). Historically, Virtus.Pro had similar issues in connecting tournament flukes, but taking only nine rounds in three games definitely sounds alarming.

SK Gaming wasn’t able to convert either of their following three matches against G2, Astralis or FaZe into wins and they will once again go back to the drawing board and figure out how to use their latest addition and why Gabriel “FalleN” Toledo has suffered from that move.

Team CLG secure a playoff spot

The random factor of the Swiss system has created a positive surprise in the shape of team CLG. For a team that hasn’t attended a notable event for three months and has revamped the majority of the player core, there weren’t too many optimists in this project. However, after losing their opener to the best team in the world Astralis, CLG recovered with a comfortable win against the Chinese squad UYA. On the third day, CLG faced Hellraisers, the team that has been gradually improving online. European mix led by Kirill “ANGE1” Karasiow, destroyed CLG on the Counter-Terrorist side of mirage with, letting only one round slip away in the process. Counter Logic gaming did manage to produce a glimpse of a comeback, but Karasiow’s team managed to close it out 16-11.

That meant CLG had to win both of their coming two matches in order to advance. In a thriller against Gambit on inferno, the American team secured a 16-14 win. That surely brought some confidence, which turned out true as they cruised to a 16-8 win against Immortals as well, eventually proceeding to playoffs.

In the elimination stage, the draw brought together two worlds - on one side we had Astralis, clearly the best team in the world with Nicolai “dev1ce” Reedtz who has been rocking the +1 kill-to-death ration with unseen consistency, with his versatility with dupreeh finally confirms the hype behind the duo that was supposed to launch them into history. Gla1ve’s calling, Kjaerbye being a complete x-factor and has proved he can provide MVP performances and Xyp9x’s consistency and role playing was too much of a task for CLG, so despite getting to double digits on both maps, they couldn’t cause a complete upset.

Ninjas in Pyjamas fall short to fnatic

With their newest signing William "draken" Sundin, Ninjas in Pyjamas will once again have to pack their bags early. This time around, the Swedes showed more composure and we saw once again how good can Patrik “forest” Lindberg play. His versatility and clutch-play, combined with friberg’s more impactful entry fragging, simply wasn’t enough to secure a place in the knockout phase. Once again we didn’t see a top level performance from GeT_Right and without him it’s tough to expect for Ninjas to become a threat.

G2 show glimpses of brilliance

The french super team G2 looked amazing throughout the whole tournament so far. Admittedly, a best-of-three schedule will show are they able to translate superior performances to longer series, but their cruise through the group does add a lot of new passengers on the G2 train.

This was the first event where we saw Kenny “kennyS” Schrub and Richard “shox” Papillon play on the same side, but the most exciting G2 player this tournament was Alexandre “bodyy” Pianaro. His individual performance definitely shut down all doubts about him securing the fifth spot on this roster.

In the first playoff round, the Frenchmen were drawn against FaZe, another uprising team that has benefited during the transfer window by acquiring the star player Nikola “NiKo” Kovač from mousesports. The game went back and forth during the whole session, but it was karrigan who proved that he found a way to integrate NiKo to a proper role and with k1o excelling with his performance, it was FaZe who came out on top.

HellRaisers on a Heroic venture

As mentioned, HellRaisers have been improving their performance in the online portion of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive tour, but they haven’t managed to transform the same play into offline events. In their opener, they shocked everyone by beating FaZe Clan, and with a complete team effort, the European mixture lost only to G2 Esports.

In the first playoff round, they faced North, a team that was one of the most stable playoff attendees in the past few months. The Danes took off to an early lead with a win on overpass, but trailing behind didn’t demoralise Karasiow’s team who pulled out a miracle on cache and overpass, sending North home.

Next stop for the European mixture was FaZe, a team that they’ve already beaten in groups on cache, but with 16-13 and 16-14 wins on mirage and train, we didn’t even manage to see a re-match on cache. FaZe went on to win the tournament, while HellRaisers were finally given proper recognition and a place in the world’s top ten.

Natus Vincere finally break the curse

Natus Vincere is the other team that marched on to playoffs with a flawless 3-0 record. Interestingly enough, this is the third time in a row that the CIS-team displays dominant performance in a best-of-one group stage. Considering that the last two times they faced relatively easy defeats, Fnatic seemed like a more suitable team in that phase for Denis “seized” Kostin’s stars. With GuardiaN once finally on point with his AWP, Na’Vi looked a force to be reckoned with, especially on the home soil.

Even though they managed to secure the first step and defeat fnatic, they simply didn’t manage to match Astralis in the semi-finals. In conclusion, Na’Vi and GuardiaN in particular, did look better and once they widen their map pool, we might see them in future events as contenders.

FaZe hold back the Astralis domination

The grand final match was a replay from IEM Katowice where we had FaZe completely pumped out, with an astounding pistol round record in the whole tournament. On the other hand, Astralis had lost only to North in the group stage which once again showed that Danish teams are good at countering each other which always produces amazing matchups. Besides the initial hiccup, Astralis looked powerful in every other match and we were definitely in for a treat.

On mirage as the first map, we have seen great composure from both teams with the whole game going back and forth, with both teams tied at 14-14 before gla1ve’s team once against showed how good they are and closing maps, taking it with a minimal score difference.

With nuke next, FaZe had shown why are they considered to having one of the strongest Counter-Terrorist sides in the world. After winning the pistol round once again, and even going to 4-0 scoreline, they slipped three rounds in Astralis favor, before completely annihilating their attacks and securing the half. Amazing performance from k1o made things much easier and the match was tied 1-1.

Coming into inferno, Astralis started strong, winning the pistol rounds and having their defense locked, giving away only five rounds to FaZe. In the second half, karrigan's squad won yet another pistol round, and slowly grinded their way back into the game. In an ecstatic finish, they forced the game to overtime by keeping the composure on the CT side. Despite Astralis having the opportunity to take the title with two match points, FaZe turned it around, getting their revenge for the loss at IEM Katowice.

That win meant a lot for Nikola “NiKo” Kovač who finally won a major event for the first time since Acer Predator Masters against Flipside, where they took $20,000. This time around FaZe took home a respectable check with $125,000, and a spot within top three teams in the world.

by Toni “anakintm” Milicevic, featured writer for GG.bet. You can reach him on twitter.com/anak1ntm