The first few match days in ESL One Cologne’s main regions are over and there are quite a few surprises. We will show you everything you need to know.
Just three days in, ESL One Cologne already delivered everything fans want to see from a CS:GO tournament. There has been upsets, overtimes, aces and clutches in nearly every match.
The North American region
Group A
In NA, one team is the main point of focus right now: Chaos has won both of their matches against two big names. First, they overcame brazilian top team FURIA with a convincing 2-0, although FURIA’s map pick Inferno went into overtime. Chaos could edge it out and take the win with 19-22.
Two days later they went up against 100 Thieves, the Australian powerhouse. While the 2-1 scoreline suggests a close match, on Nuke and Mirage Chaos looked very confident and took the win.
Group A favorites FURIA will have to win their next match against Gen.G in order to have a shot in the playoffs.
Read more:
- ESL One Cologne 2020 Online – streams, schedule and more
- Confirmed: Lekr0 joins North
- FaZe.Broky: “MIBR should be an easy win for us”
Group B
The other group did not surprise quite as much. Evil Geniuses secured a dominant 2-0 win against Triumph on the first matchday, while Liquid managed to overcome a first map loss against Cloud9 and turn it into a 2-1 match win.
The group’s favorites will fight for the first place today at 8pm GMT or 10pm CEST.
The European division
Group A
As in North America, Group A in Europe managed to surprise most counter-Strike fans, as number 1 team in the world BIG was sent packing after losing against German competitor Sprout and the Swedish powerhouse Ninjas in Pyjamas.
Against NiP, the second map Nuke was a huge brawl taking over 50 rounds for the ninjas to finally close it out.
CS gives and CS takes. A hearbreaking defeat against @NiPgaming ends our #ESLOne tournament run. We couldn’t do it today, but mark our words: #ESLOne will be ours. GGWP pic.twitter.com/Pw8CXFvlvr
— BIG (@BIGCLANgg) August 20, 2020
The upper semi final matches will be played out on saturday and sunday with Sprout having their first chance to qualify for playoffs against OG. On the other side of the bracket NaVi will have to overcome the international roster of Complexity to secure their playoff slot.
Group B
In the second group, Astralis showed how strong of a team they are with their two new players in the first match against Fnatic. They beat the swedes on Nuke in a convincing 16-5 match and then took them to overtime on Train, which ended in a close 19-17 win for the Danes.
Fnatic then managed to kick the French underdogs Team Heretics out of the tournament in the first lower bracket match. They will play against the loser of Heroic vs G2, who will play on sunday.
Today at 6:30 pm CEST FaZe and MIBR will have a best of three to decide who will leave the tournament early. the winner will go on to play against either Vitality or Astralis, depending on who loses that matchup on saturday.
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Playoffs
In NA, playoffs wills start Thursday, August 27th with one semi-final being played out. The grand final will start on August 29th at 10pm CEST or 8pm GMT.
Since there are double the teams in Europe, the playoffs start out with the quarter-finals on thursday, August 27th with the grand final taking place on August 30th at 6:30pm CEST.
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