Photo: ESL / Helena Kristiansson

Early Sunday, our Lower Bracket match against Team Spirit kicked off in the ESL Pro League Season 17. The match was a must-win match as the winner would progress to the Lower Bracket final, in which the winner will qualify for the Playoffs.

Notorious Nuke was the first map of the match, chosen by us. Though Spirit won the pistol round, we took the next one, and with a sequence of rounds won, we quickly took the lead. Unfortunately, Spirit fought hard and eventually won the first half 6-9. We kicked off our second half in strong fashion with five won rounds in a row. Once again, Spirit fought back hard and won the map 12-16.

Losing our map pick didn't hit us too hard as we went into the second map, Mirage. The entire game was a close affair, with both halves ending with 8-7 scores. Throughout the game, Christian 'Buzz' Andersen once more proved his value with insane plays. When we won the map with a nail-biting 16-14 score, Buzz had a 1.33 rating!

With the overall score now set a 1-1, the deciding map, Ancient, was up. Throughout the tournament, our CT-side on Ancient has proved to be a weak spot, but this time around, we proved that hard work ends in great results. With massive performances from our entire squad, we won the first half with a 9-6 score and went into the second half filled with confidence. The second half was a more evenly matched affair, but in the end, we closed out the map with a 16-12 score and thus secured our spot in the crucial Lower Bracket Final against Team Liquid!

Nicolai 'dev1ce' Reedtz and Benjamin 'blameF' Bremer were absolutely colossal in the deciding map with 1.57 and 1.47 ratings, respectively. Both dev1ce and blameF made massive plays, including a crazy ace clutch from the big man, blameF!

Our next deciding map will be played on Sunday evening at 19.30 CET, where we face off against Team Liquid for the last spot in the Playoffs. You can watch the game here

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