17:50 The veto is in – we start on Mirage
The pick-ban didn’t provide many surprises in this BO5 as ENCE removed their permaban Inferno and Cloud9 did the same with Nuke, not repeating the mistake they did against FaZe at the PGL Major Antwerp.
The full veto is as follows:
1. ENCE removed Inferno
2. Cloud9 removed Nuke
3. ENCE picked Mirage
4. Cloud9 picked Overpass
5. ENCE picked Ancient
6. Cloud9 picked Vertigo
7. Dust2 was left over
17:40 Crowd favorites or Polish power – who will come out on top?
ENCE and Cloud9 will shortly step up on the stage of the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center and kick off the BO5 final of the $250,000 IEM Dallas. The winner will take home $100,000, the iconic IEM plate, and join the race for the $1,000,000 Intel Grand Slam.
Who will lift the trophy today?
For both teams, this would be a first tournament win of this caliber. While Cloud9 dominated in the online era, winning three IEM events in 2021 as Gambit, they are yet to repeat that success in a crowd-filled arena.
For ENCE this would be a similarly big feat. The organization did find success with their all-Finnish lineup in 2019, but never reached a higher world ranking then their current one, as they sit at No. 3 in the world.
After a victory over FaZe in the quarters, Cloud9 won over the fans in the arena, with chants for the organization and individual players heard as they took down BIG in the semis. However, super-sub, Major winner, and former member of the iconic Virtus.pro squad Janusz “Snax” Pogorzelski will surely have quite a few people cheering for ENCE as well.
Find the grand final lineups and their tournament ratings below:
Paweł “dycha” Dycha – 1.19
Pavle “Maden” Bošković – 1.11
Marco “Snappi” Pfeiffer – 0.98
Eetu “sAw” Saha (coach)
Sergey “Ax1Le” Rykhtorov – 1.33
Abay “HObbit” Khasenov – 1.06
