I missed most of the play-ins, but I was able to catch the Faze match and see them book their ticket to the group stage.

Surprisingly, all of the games later today have decent odds, and i'll be looking forward to Tyloo's next match because even though they haven't lost against 3DMAX, they're barely the favorites.

Yes same here. Have been missing most of these matches aswell. That happens when the weather has been perfect outside so your not wanting to sit and watch anything on your screen.
Team Vitality is currently playing Astralis and just won map 1. While The Mongolz are going against 3Dmax and it is isn't looking so good for them playing the Mongolians.

Did not know this was Kyosuke first Tier 1 match with his new team until I read it on hltv.org earlier while checking the scores of the live matches for this IEM Cologne:

Beating a good FURIA squad who are starting to click together as a team themselves, with a very impressive 2-0. It does look as if they are starting strong in this tournament and wouldn't doubt in seeing them in the semis.
The one that surprised me in the matches yesterday was NIP losing to Aurora so badly.

Looking forward to the following matches scheduled for today:
Falcons vs Mongolz, Gamerlegion vs 3DMax and G2 vs Vitality.

Mongolz look really good, almost as good team wise as vitality. They should meet again and decide the winner of IEM

Spirit however, entirely depend on donk, and he had 30+ kills in the map just ended and dragged them to win against a xantares less Aurora 

They're still lacking at the tactical level, but if they can make some improvements and have better set pieces, then they might close that gap.

Despite donk popping off on the server, they almost lost their map pick Nuke. The situation only turned around for them thanks to xfloud's sudden shout at zweih for only having 1-2 kills after 10+ rounds, and then the guy decided to drop a multi-kill on the next round to kill Aurora's momentum.

They somehow played worse than before, and they threw so many man advantages that should've been converted into winning rounds.

Did anyone notice the new stake sponsorship on vitality shirts?



Includes the shoulder logos too

This is after sbio is already sponsoring imperial CS

Also huge shocking move by s1mple as he moved to bcgame team yesterday, replacing nawwk

Also looks like they might be adding more stars soon, funny how bc had declared bankruptcy few time back  

I have not. But this looks clean but with that color of jersey, it makes me remember of NaVi at first for being yellow but that's for dota 2. Since this is for CS2, this is beautiful.

LOL, I thought that bc you're talking about was with beastcoast(bc). Anyway, I haven't heard that they have filed for bankruptcy before when they're also a popular casino these days. I've remembered them supported a dota 2 team but that had to stop asap.

Yup, being familiar with Dota made it easier to understand, and listening to the casters helps a lot.

I also saw it on HLTV and was surprised to see their new jersey with the big stake logo.

The group stage also ended yesterday, and this time we could have a Spirit vs. Vitality matchup in the grand final, assuming Team Spirit and Vitality don't underperform while waiting in the semifinals.

@passwordnow
Correct, several pro players have dropped to a lower tier before. The last player I can recall with such a high-profile on the CS2 scene was Kirill Mikhailov aka Boombl4 which was also on NaVi. I remember watching his comeback to the counterstrike scene over a year ago where he was playing with a team nobody ever heard of but he eventually settled with Betboom after several months.

The semi-finals are almost set but we have to wait until Friday's quarter-finals results between MOUZ vs FURIA & The Mongolz vs NaVi to see who Team Spirit and Team Vitality will face the next day.

I would say FURIA will advance since they have been playing lights out from all their matches I have seen so far.
And probably NaVi since Mongolz have been disappointing in their last match yesterday. So the momentum is just not there for them to move forward.