Grayhound, Rooster qualify for ESL Pro League Season 17 Conference

Grayhound and Rooster have earned a place at ESL Pro League Season 17 Conference after guaranteeing top-two finishes in the 15th instalment of the ESL Australia & NZ Championship.

The two teams still have one last matchup left to play in the form of a best-of-five grand final on Sunday at 07:00 , with the winner taking home the ~$5,500 grand prize.

Grayhound had a relatively straightforward run through the domestic competition. The team around Joshua “⁠INS⁠” Potter, who recently returned from a 12-14th place run through the Challengers Stage of the IEM Rio Major, put up a flawless 3-0 record in the group stage to finish as the top seed.

The Australian quintet doubled down once in the playoffs, where they rode through the upper bracket with commanding victories over God’s Work, Encore, and finally VERTEX to simultaneously secure a grand final appearance and lock in a spot at the ESL Pro League Season 17 Conference.

INS led by example throughout the event and the Grayhound captain heads into the grand final versus Rooster as the tournament’s highest-performing player, averaging a 1.45 rating across the 13 maps played thus far.

Alistair and co. finished the last season of EPL Conference in 9-12th place

Rooster also performed well throughout the group stage. The Australian-majority lineup held a 3-1 record by the end of things to finish the first part of the competition as the third seed.

Things soon went awry for Rooster once the playoffs got started, as they were sent down to the lower bracket after a gut-wrenching loss to VERTEX in the second round.

This didn’t deter the squad, however, and they took the lower bracket run in stride, defeating Encore, the second-highest-ranked team in the event, before getting revenge over VERTEX in the consolidation final to punch in their ticket to the ESL Pro League Season 17 prelude.

The remaining spots up for grabs for ESL Pro League Season 17 Conference, which features the Major winners of Outsiders, will be filled by the winners of ESL Challenger League Season 43 North America and Europe, as well as the victors of other national leagues throughout Europe and South America.

The current team list for ESL Pro League Season 17 Conference is as follows: