Just as we may have experienced a draught in the past few days when it comes to eSports, the energy was being saved for the upcoming tournaments. One of the bigger ones being the ECS Finals.
ECS is Faceit’s main premier league organised in partnership with YouTube, currently featuring their 6th season which takes place over the span of 9 months. American fans can consider themselves spoilt with choice when it comes to CS.GO events in the last few months as ECS Season 6 will take place inside the brand new ESports Arena in Arlington, Texas. Matches will be played across three days from the 22nd of November until the 25th of November with a total prize pool of $660,000 up for grabs.
The group stage will be played in a double elimination format with the group stage matches being played in a best of 1 maps. Top 2 teams from each group will advance to the best of three single elimination stage. The tournament has attracted the best of the best, including three of the top 5 teams in the world: Astralis, Liquid and mousesports.
GROUP A
Astralis
Cloud9
MiBR
mousesports
GROUP B
Liquid
NiP
North
NRG
The Group seedings are done based on the online standings. The defending champions Astralis will have to battle their way through the group with mousesports MIBR and Cloud9. Astralis goes in to this tournament as a strong favourite being 22-0 at the lan events as well as 27-0 overall including online matches as well, it seems like there’s nobody to stop them right now.
On top of all Astralis won’t be battling with jetlag as they have been bootcamping in the US for the past 2 weeks, practicing ahead of the tournament.
Mousesports, world’s 5th best team also made it to the tournament however many will be curious to see how they perform after bringing STYKO back to the main squad. Organisation was surrounded by criticism after their misfortunate transfer of Janusz “snax” Pogrzelski for $200,000 who failed to replicate his performance from the latter stage of his career at Virtus Pro.
Meanwhile Cloud9 are coming to the event with lower expectations, team struggled with stability, having to play with multiple stand ins over the past few months it seems like they have finally settled on a very interesting consistency of European players mixed inside of an American squad. Of course they have 7 Majors between the 5 so the team is full of experienced winners, the question is will this consistency stand a chance against the likes of Astralis or MiBR that have been with stable lineups close to 12 months now.
In Group B we Liquid that are the clear favourites, currently ranked 3rd in the world they will have high expectations to reach their 6th final at a Big Event in 2018. However unlikely it may be Liquid are considered ‘the team’ to beat Astralis and finish their streak. Of course Liquid will still have to battle through their group stages and with team equally as hungry to show off.
North will be looking to return to the US for the first time since their last disappointing campaign in Chicago, where they placed as one of the bottom teams. Of Course bringing in cadiaN after MSL was benched was meant to bring results they anticipated but their most recent results, since MSL’s departure have been pretty disappointing.
NiP on the other hand seem like they finally found some sort of rhythm but sheer confidence still isn’t there as they have a lot of shaky rounds in the latter stages of matches, they’d be looking to build their confidence and battle through the group stages, they certainly have a chance.
NRG at last are one of the most consistently growing teams in the world actually as they went from being 59th back in December 2016 just to work their way up to the current 8th spot. After beating OpTic at cs_summit 3 they’ll have high expectations to leave the group, especially with the results they’ve shown offline in the past months.
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