That's always the downside with teams coming from the lower bracket, but that handicap didn't affect Team Liquid as much once game three started. Crazy to think that a stand-in is the key factor to making teams more successful, last time it was Aurora, and now it's Yandex.

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As for the ESL finals, NaVi came out on top after Aurora managed to win on Anubis. Wonderful put in the work during the finals, but Makazze became the MVP due to his consistent rating throughout the tournament. I guess they don't need to attend that Tier 2 event anymore now that their rankings shot up from 8th to 4th after that impressive run.

This grand finals was all in favor of Navi and started to watch when they started dust2 but it looks like it was a no contest on the previous map.
Didn't think they were this dominant watching them struggle in the last few tournaments but I think they have found the formula now and even right at the end they were saying "No Vitality this time!".

As he had mentioned it were players on the Navi squad that pulled the team to this level such as Makazze.
Who I had not heard of before this Pro League as the entire roster on the Navi side had changed.
The only one I recognize were b1t, w0nderful and Aleksib.

But good for them on winning their first major of the year and now Team Vitality aren't the only champions of them this year.

Regardless of this initial result, I think both teams, NaVi and Aurora, can continue with the momentum they showed at the end of the last tournament. And even if they lose, they have another chance in the Lower Bracket. So, let's wait and see. This many tournaments this year is good; I'm liking the pace.

The only qualifier teams I trust are the tier-one teams. For the rest, I expect them to fall short since only half can survive and advance to the playoffs.

I'm looking forward to how the other teams bounce back after those stand-in issues from the previous event.

Navi are starting strong fresh off their major win and are leading in OT on the second map against B8.
Looks like they will win have another easy 2:0 win against a lesser team today.

Faze are in shambles and expect Aurora to do the exact same to them in the next match starting in a few minutes.
I would expect FURIA to be a lower tiered Tyloo team aswell.

We finally got an upset, and it came from the Mouz vs. MongolZ series. Their H2H (11-1 in favor of Mouz) made me think there's nothing to see in this series, but I was wrong. Even without their coach Maara, i'm impressed that MongolZ didn't let off the gas pedal after the first map and went on to crush Mouz in their map pick. We'll probably get a rematch between them again because the MongolZ will face Vitality in the next match, and beating Vitality is just impossible.



The lower bracket matches later might spice things up, as I can imagine FaZe somehow losing to Tyloo if they don't get their shit together.

We've got 2 days left before the group stage starts. I do agree that the tier one teams that were qualified might be the survivor on this group stage. While the other qualified teams that are able to make it might have hard time. But this is the good thing in group stages, there will be upsets, tiebreakers and some potentials to be seen. Here are the first day matches on March 22;

Really really HUGE upset yesterday as G2 not only beat Geng, but they destroyed them in a 3-0 fashion

Skewmond had a career legacy series instantly putting as one of the top junglers in LoL
Today they play vs BLG and are 3 odds, blg has been looking good too but was yesterday just a bad day for geng or g2 gonna go all the way?

Day 1 is done for the ESL One Birmingham. These are the results below for the matches that we've got today. Noticing, Tundra and Mouz did good on the very first day. These are best of 2 games and they all won 4 games that they had played today. As for Team Falcons, this isn't what we're expecting with them but it's just the day 2, let's see the next days.