The second groupstage of the Fragbite Masters have been made public, splitting the surviving 16 teams into four new groups of four teams each, to be played out over the course of the upcoming week, starting tomorrow, October 28th, with Group A and finishing on Sunday, November 3rd, with Group D.
Group A
There are some notable discrepancies regarding the relative strength of the groups, with in particular Group A coming accross as a very lackluster set of teams which likely would have struggled to qualify from the other groups. 4 Friends + Chrillee are a likely favourite for the group, while Baguette who are now under new sponsorship as Sigma.Fr are the second established name of the group. Given both teams ambitions, they should be expected to defeat two relative upstarts, although hehe_united are a team who seem to be cropping up a bit more lately and might be able to cause a minor upset.
Group B
By far the hardest group is Group B, where not only do we have Alliance and Speed Gaming as favourites to advance, but we have the old Next.Kz now known as Ahead.Kz as well as Stay Free, a promising North American team with several Heroes of Newerth players who recently made the transition. The prospect for upsets with best-of-three double elimination groups is somewhat mitigated, but the freshness of the new patch does further unbalance the equation. It's certainly not out of the question that a veteran team like Ahead.Kz could cause some major waves in this group, especially with the current strength of Brewmaster, a hero which Next.Kz nearly qualified for TI2 on the back of.
Group C
Group C should by recent results go to mousesports and Super Strong Dinosaurs by a narrow margin, but with Marcus 'Ace' Hoelgaard absent for the next few weeks, things become a lot less predictable in what was already a very close group. Power Rangers already showed that they can take games off the best during the previous StarLadder season and Terrible Terrible Damage carries a number of promising players who were left behind in the CIS shuffle, in particular player formerly attached to iCCup. With all of that in mind, you might as well roll the dice as hope to predict the outcome of this group.
Group D
For Group D many would be likely to put Fnatic at the top of the list followed by a tentative nod to Virtus.Pro, especially since their competition isn't exactly daunting. However Fnatic is currently taking part in the Nexon Invitational over in Korea and will likely return home only days ahead of their games for this round. Reverse jetlag after such a trip and generally the possibilities for post travel malaise should be kept in mind and might throw the team off of their game, although likely not more so than to give Virtus.Pro the opening to take first place in the group.
Format
The format of the competition is not entirely clear. The rules state that it will be a best of three double elimination, which would indicate that two games will need to be run paralell in order to fit all the games into the single day schedule indicated. If this is the case it still does not make it clear how the consolidation matches will be made to fit, as the rules previously indicated that they would all be played on Friday, November 1st, however with Group D being moved to Sunday due to conflicting with Fnatic's Nexon participation, it is as of yet unknown how these issues will be resolved.
English language broadcasting for the event will continue to be provided by The GD Studio crew as they have up until this point, through the Fragbite twitch channel.