The Red Bull Battle Grounds qualifiers CIS division is about to kick off, four top CIS teams shall battle each other in a best-of-one double elimination bracket to get to the best-of-three finals which will decide who gets the ticket to the LAN finals.
Today marks the start of the Red Bull Battle Grounds CIS division which features four top teams from the CIS region battling for a spot in the LAN finals. The tournament boasts a $75 000 prize pool and the fighting CIS teams are Virtus.Pro, Empire, Na'Vi and Hellraisers. The first best-of-one will be be Empire vs Hellraisers, taking place at 15:00 CEST.
The winner of this qualifier will join four other regional winners at the LAN finals held in Santa Monica on the 5th through 10th of May; so far only two teams have been decided, they are Team MY (from the SEA qualifiers) and Invictus Gaming (from the Chinese qualifiers).
Of the four teams, Empire has been putting up the strongest performance recently, going on a five win streak and having a 14/6 win loss ratio in the month of March. They have also recently taken down the fourth best team on Gosurankings, EG (2-1), in their game at the MLG Columbus LAN finals.
As for the other teams, Virtus Pro has had a relatively solid showing in recent times, being able to win against strong European and CIS teams, winning against HR (2-1) and Ninjas in Pyjamas (2-1). Na'Vi and Hellraisers on the other hand, have proven that they can sometimes pull an upset against top teams like Alliance (2-0 twice by HR) and NiP (1-1 by Na'Vi); however, they have not been able to consistently put up this kind of performance as they have dropped games to various teams. For example, Na'Vi losing to Burden United 2-0 and HellRaisers losing to Basically Unknown 2-0.
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