Evil Geniuses are denied the grand finals spot by losing the lower bracket final against Team Liquid on the back of an overwhelming performance by the Europeans.
The betting odds for the Evil Geniuses vs Team Liquid lower bracket final were definitely favoring the boys in blue with 69%, however, today EG had one of the poorest showings in a very long time, from drafting to execution and individual plays.
Team Liquid came to this Major from the regional qualifiers and they’ve fought hard through the entire tournament, dropping to the lower bracket only yesterday when they lost the upper bracket finals to Team Secret.
Today they came prepared and more determined than ever - ready to challenge for the Shanghai Major title and for now, half of the job is already done. They’ve been allowed to pick some of their strongest heroes in both games, Adrian 'FATA-' Trinks got away with his Invoker in the first game draft and with Death Prophet in the second game while the Ivan 'MinD_ContRoL' Borislavov's Nature’s Prophet was the first Liquid pick for both games.
Despite giving the ultimate Sprout counter for Sven to Liquid, Peter 'ppd' Dager drafted the hero for Artour 'Arteezy' Babaev in game one. EG had a rather good laning phase and were playing aggressively with successful ganks with early usage of Black Hole to shut down Liquid’s line-up. They had been in the lead for the entire game which might have let the overconfidence set in.
Although they’ve managed to wipe out Kuro 'KuroKy' Salehi Takhasomi’s team at the 33 minute mark due to a four man Black Hole from Clinton 'Fear' Loomis, Liquid bought back and executed EG on the retreat path and counter pushed the top lane forcing three buybacks from the North Americans. To keep the pressure mounting, they forced yet another big team fight knowing that EG had no Black Hole and made perfect usage of the Nature’s Prophet Sprout to isolate and kill again Arteezy’s Sven which triggered the GG call from ppd.
For the second game of the series EG went with a strong team fight oriented draft with four big ultimates while Liquid was building their strategy on heavy push. They punished the EG intellect heroes line-up and especially the Zeus pick for Syed Sumail 'Suma1L' Hassan with a last pick Nyx Assassin. EG tried to salvage everything with a Naga Siren last pick but unfortunately for them it didn’t work.
A key moment of the early game was the radiant courier getting sniped by Jesse 'JerAx' Vainikka, an event that shifted the mid lane balance dramatically in Liquid’s favour.
Because of Liquid’s focus on achieving all the building objectives as fast as possible, Arteezy found the necessary farm for an under 20 minutes Radiance but by the time he had it EG was already defending high ground and the magic burn was no issue for Liquid.
The Shanghai Major lower bracket final will remain in our memories for a while as one of the rare occasion when both Suma1L and Arteezy finished the game with negative scores; 1-5-2 respectively 0-3-2 and EG was seriously outmaneuvered and outplayed.
Shanghai Major final standings:
1st: $1,110,000: TBD
2nd: $405,000: TBD
3rd: $315.000: 
Evil Geniuses
4th, $255,000: 
MVP Phoenix
5th-6th, $202,000:
7th-8th, $105,000:
9th-12th, $45,000:
EHOME
LGD Gaming
Virtus.Pro
Newbee
13th-16th, $30,000:
