NAVI top Group B over Liquid

Natus Vincere have defeated Liquid in the Group B final following a 16-4 victory, recovering from an opening round loss to Complexity by sweeping through the lower bracket to secure a spot directly in the third round of the gauntlet stage.

The Denis “⁠electroNic⁠” Sharipov-led side came into the tournament lacking their superstar Oleksandr “⁠s1mple⁠” Kostyliev and got off to a shaky start, but managed to turn things around and finish on top of their group. They now sit just one best-of-three series win away from qualifying for the BLAST Fall Final, with a second lifeline in the last chance bracket also available should they falter.

Liquid were offered little room to maneuver on Dust2 and ended up on the receiving end of a battering, getting a similar treatment to their Complexity countrymen who had just been demolished by NAVI on Overpass.

There was a brief back-and-forth at the start of the map, a force-buy war seeing the teams trade blows before Natus Vincere came out on top to take the lead. Despite holding a handful of advantageous situations after that, Nick “⁠nitr0⁠” Cannella‘s men were unable to put a halt to the duo of Valeriy “⁠b1t⁠” Vakhovskiy and Ilya “⁠Perfecto⁠” Zalutskiy, who excelled on the T side for NAVI as they cruised to an 11-4 lead at the break.

Once the sides swapped over, Liquid had almost no margin for error, and the one chance they had to get back in the running went the way of NAVI as Perfecto clutched a 1vs2 to put his team on match point before they closed things out.