It is Friday, the first day of the NGL1 final event in Berlin is over with two tournaments in the center of the eSports coverage worldwide, CS 1.6 and WCIII.
Let's take a look at the happenings arounf WCIII at first. MYM seems to impress everyone here. Their lineup seems to be the one you'd have to beat if you want to get the title. So far they played two matches. The first vs. Fnatic wasnt really a challenge in my eyes with the best player on the Fnatic roster not showing up in Berlin. Susiria did the rest and took the straight 4-0 home for his team. Pretty good you could say and in a tournament even better, as you don't have the chance of analyzing all players and their tactics with only one playing so far.
The other match, 4Kings vs. WE with much more interesting matches taking place. The 4K players are always a hard opponent, but this time WE has the upper hand with Reign battling down Tod and Grubby and Lyn getting the last needed win over Creo. Remarkable was Reigns match over Grubby, when he surrounded the Blademaster three times in a row. This was just too much and I think this was the key match for WE.
Following was the upper brackets final between WE and MYM. We know the result, 4-0 for Moon...ahhh, MYM. Though it was not that clear in my eyes. It was Reign again with a good match on Turtle Rock, when he took down Moons expansion, attacked, found the right moment to build his own expansion, but lost it all when he thought he could at that moment take a deciding fight with Moon where it just wasn't necessary. He had control and could have kept it and by that beaten Moon. Instead it was gg. To me the key in this Clanwar.
What leaves us with the upcoming lower bracket final, 4Kings vs Fnatic. Anything but a clear victory of the players around Tod would be a big surprise to me, but hey, we will see. The winner will face WE again and if I predict right, this will be 4Kings. Well, tomorrow we will see a different 4Kings. I am sure of that and this one might be closer than the match today. In the end I believe no matter what, they will fight for the 2nd spot in the tournament, as MYM seems too strong and we will see, maybe only 2 MYM players will have to be active at these finals. Who knows...
CS - and the question, why did Fnatic lose to 69N 28E? Simple answer, 69N was just better overall in my eyes. To me Nuke is a map where this can happen. On the other hand I don't share other peoples opinion on Fnatic still being as strong as they have been in previous tournaments, especially in 2006. It seems harder for them to just find the needed stability in their game. They will have their chance tomorrow. 69N on the other hand marches to the upper bracket final.
Coming to the second CS match we saw that night. Our team playing NoA. History: We beat them at SEC without showing weakness. We lost to them in NGL1 regular season and that one was not the best CS we could play. Today on Nuke we played CT first, won the pistol, but had to give away the 3rd round. Overall we lost too many unnecessary rounds as CT and the 8-7 for us was 2 rounds to low. A 10-5 would have been ok. Anyway, as T we lost the pistol, but could win the third and fourth round. But the fifth round was a pretty deciding one. We lost it and also the next one. I guess the combination of the not too good result from the first half and those two rounds was our ticket to the lower bracket. What I have learned at ESL Masters and SEC two weeks ago is that most of the time, when a match can go either way, it is those key rounds that decide. Overall NoA played better than we did due to several reasons. We will have to try and fight our way back ito the tournament now by facing Fnatic.
In my eyes it could not be better. Though it is dust_2 again, like it was at ESL Masters, but if we play our match tomorrow the way we are capable of playing CS, it will need a very strong dsn like in Hannover to knock us out.
I won't make any predictions on this one, as anything can happen here but of course I hope for the best and would like to see more than only two matches of our guys here in Berlin.