The last day of this year’s Fragbite Masters has brought us a suspenseful consolidation as well as a stunning back-and-forth grand final.
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SK Gaming in top form
Yesterday, SK showed up in an unbelievably convincing form taking out the ex-TSM lineup. Today they were to face fnatic, the clear favorites of that matchup. But despite the fact that they were going against one of (if not the) best team they made it clear that they were there to fight. In doing so, they succeeded on the first map, as they closed Overpass on a 16-12 score line.
The following two maps then did go in the favor of fnatic again, who went on to the grand final after sweeping away SK with 16-5 and 16-6 wins on Inferno and Mirage respectively. The Danes nonetheless demonstrated that they are willing and – most importantly – capable of advancing in the international rankings.
The battle of the Swedish giants
While many wished for the two best Swedish teams to clash on home ground, they definitely proved to be worthy of standing against each other in the grand finals. Initially, NiP had sent fnatic down to the consolidation with a 2-1 win, but walking past SK, fnatic managed to surge up again. The map pool was however not really considered to be in their favor.
On just the first map fnatic proved everybody wrong. A clear incision was made in winning Train 16-9, literally crushing the Ninjas on the map on which they actually were favored more.
That was the point at which NiP had to fight back in order to survive. On Dust2, both teams got to a back and forth game, until the Ninjas got a trend going after the evenly split first half. Fnatic made them stop at some points, but that did not keep NiP from crushing their opponents pretty convincingly with a 16-9 win.
That of course meant the use of the decider map, Mirage, to determine the better team out of the two. NiP brought it to a 7 rounds lead as Anders called them out to probably win a final this year. At this point it suddenly broke down with fnatic gaining round after round, closing the half with 9-6. Despite the score line not being in their favor, they got a momentum going that eventually led to a 12-11 lead. The interesting thing to notice there is that fnatic were able to win almost every force-up round they had. In the end they could not be stopped as they decided the grand finals of this year’s Fragbite Masters by winning 16-12 on Mirage.
