Astralis Become ESL Pro League Champions in Dominant Fashion

Robert Gooderson 6 years ago
Robert Gooderson 6 years ago

Since May 15, 16 of the worlds best Counter-Strike: Global Offensive teams have been battling in the ESL Pro League Season 7 Finals. The prize drawing the eyes was a share of $750,000 and of course the trophy. The format this year for the offline finals was a little different than previous years with the field expanding to 16 teams, adding in three qualification spots from both the ANZ (Australia and New Zealand) and China regions along with two spots from the SEA (South East Asia) region.

With this in mind, the qualified teams for the event were as follows:

  • MVP PK
  • Grayhound
  • mousesports
  • Ninjas in Pyjamas
  • Natus Vincere
  • FaZe
  • Space Soldiers
  • Astralis
  • Heroic (replacing HellRaisers due to visa issues)
  • Sharks
  • Liquid
  • NRG
  • OpTic
  • Cloud9
  • Renegades
  • SK Gaming

The event was double elimination during the group stages with all matches bar the opening matches (Best of one) and the Grand Final (Best of five) being best of three.

The Danes’ domination was clear from the outset as they brushed aside OpTic 16-3 in their opening match. Next up to the plate was a 2-0 victory over the struggling SK Gaming with Peter “dupreeh” Rasmussen being particularly hot throughout. Their next scoreline could pretty much be guessed at this point as they took yet another 2-0 victory, this time over Liquid as the entire team finished with a positive score over the two maps and HLTV ratings above 1.10.

Their results simply continued to get more and more impressive as the event moved on, taking down the second best team in the world FaZe 2-0 in the Semi-Final. The first map, Mirage, was a complete destruction 16-3 whilst the second was a barely more respectable 16-6. It was clear the Danes were just continuing to improve at the tournament as they seemed untouchable at this point, not dropping a single map.

The most important match of the tournament, the Grand Final, was to be against a team they had already defeated once in the form of Liquid. Perhaps with five maps the North American team would have a chance at taking down the European masters, but then again, perhaps not.

The first map appeared to lean towards the latter possibility as the Danes took an incredible 16-1 victory on Dust 2, giving the North Americans nothing to cling to. Nuke, the second map, was a far tighter affair though as despite winning the lesser favoured Terrorist side 9-6 Astralis only just closed it out 16-14. It looked to be heading in the same direction on Mirage as Astralis took the first half 8-7 but the North Americans finally found their fight and took a 14-16 victory back to hold onto hope.

Hope fades fast when, despite taking a 5-10 lead, you run into a brick wall on your Terrorist side of Inferno. Liquid managed to pick up only two rounds in their second half as Astralis mounted an 11 round comeback interrupted only once. The 16-12 map signalled that the battle was over, the Danes take the 4-1 victory and with it the trophy and $250,000.

Dropping one map for the entire event shows an incredibly dominant side to Astralis as they solidify their position as the number 1 team in the world.