EPICENTER 2018: on the eve of the battles

CS2 / News / 21 October 2018 — 21:00

The coming championship will hardly be a walk in the park

From October 22 to October 28, we are going to see the largest CS:GO tournament of the current month- - EPICENTER 2018. NAVI.GG.BET will be joining the fight on Tuesday, so let's take a look at what we can expect from it.

The venue of the competition will be a multifunctional sports complex "CSKA Arena" (the former name is “VTB Ice Palace”). CSKA Arena is the home turf for CSKA and Spartak hockey clubs. The capacity of the arena varies from 10 000 to 14 000 spectators depending on the event held.

Five teams received a direct invitation to the championship: NAVI, FaZe Clan, Team Liquid, Astralis and mousesports. However, the original list of invited teams was changed, as Astralis and mousesports declined the invites, so, their places were taken by NiP and AVANGAR. In addition, the sixth participant of the tournament was revealed - team ENCE. The Finnish five got to EPICENTER 2018 due to the best position in the HLTV.org rating among all the Wild Card participants.

As you can guess, the remaining participants of the tournament will be determined through the Wild Card. Four teams will play in those qualifiers, and here are the pairs of opponents for the first stage: Virtus.pro - 5POWER and HellRaisers - Swole patrol. Wild Card will feature a double elimination, best of 3 bracket. Thus, the winner of the qualifier will be seeded into group A, the runner-up - into group B.

The format of the main stage involves the group stage and the playoffs. The first stage will see GSL system being used, and 6 teams - 3 per group, will advance further. In this case, the winners in the groups will immediately go to the semifinals, and those who take second and third places will go to the quarterfinals. All games will be bo3. As for the playoffs, no changes are foreseen here: single elimination, best of 3. The prize pool of the tournament will be $ 300,000.

Let's take a look at our group stage opponents. At the end of the draw, our team was assigned to Group A along with FaZe Clan, ENCE and a wild card winner. The first matches of the group are also ready: FaZe Clan will duke it out with ENCE, while NAVI will fight with the Wild Card.

Semifinals
Winners' Finals
To the semi-finals

FaZe Clan

ENCE

NAVI.GG.BET

Wild Card #1

TBD

Round 1
To the quarterfinals

TBD

Let's talk a little about those rivals of the Born to Win who we already know: FaZe Clan and ENCE. The European team is experiencing a serious performance drop, which has led to a number of unsatisfactory results. Faze didn't make it out of the groups at DreamHack Masters Stockholm, then the team managed to go through the major group stage by the skin of their teeth (coming back from the 0-2) and at the end of September the team took the last place at ESL One NY.

In an attempt to solve the problems that had arisen, the team made serious internal changes: Niko became the game leader, with karrigan stepping back. The first attempt at making a change happened during the FACEIT Major after losing to BIG and NAVI. However, on the ESL One NY team decided to give karrigananother chance, but he still seemed to struggle.

As a result, the team is now led by Niko and the results do not look encouraging. For now FaZe takes part in two online leagues: ECS S6, where it takes 5th place out of 10 after 8 matches; ESL Pro League S8 - 5th place out of 14 after 20 meetings held. Let's see what the Europeans can demonstrate on the first LAN, with Niko, the captain, being the main star.

While ENCE, on the contrary, enjoys a rather stable position, unlike its counterpart. The team recently played at StarSeries S6, where they had their first win at a LAN tournament with a prize pool of $ 250,000. On the way to this achievement, the Finnish five beat BIG (2:0) OpTic Gaming (2:1) and Vega Squadron (3:2). Subsequently, sergej,who finished the championship with a rating of 1.25, was the one to receive the MVP award.

In addition, thanks to the victory at StarSeries S6 ENCE gained a few points in HLTV.org ranking, jumping from 18th to 11th place, beating HellRaisers by 9 points (175 against 166). This development of the events allowed ENCE to bypass the Wild Card stage, starting their run at the EPICENTER straight from the main event, while HellRaisers , after their performance in Kyiv, are yet to earn this right.

We hope that a little rest after ESL One NY and the matches of the ESL Pro League S8 have benefited our guys. We believe that Natus Vincere will delight the fans with their game and will do everything to take the champion title in Moscow! #NAVINATION