In just a week, from March 17-18, a total of eight teams will find themselves in a clinch to gather as much as possible from the $80,000 prize pool that is on the line. Four of them should be considered to be the favourites, as they are the group with the highest chances of making it to the playoffs depending on the group seeds. Ironically, these are exactly the four teams that have been invited.
Team EnVyUs
The French squad has been in quite a slump recently and were pushed back to the company of mousesports, FaZe and NiP as the group of teams being put down in the group stages of IEM: Katowice. But unlike the others they were seen as favourites for making it through, especially since half of the teams were awarded with an advancement, the reason for their departure were their losses against Tempo Storm and even E-Frag. Such a disappointment had to provoke a reaction and the management of EnVyUs did so in removing Fabien “kioShiMa” Fiey from the roster in favour of Timothée “DEVIL” Démolon. At least for the time being this will not help in terms of resurging, as DEVIL has to be integrated. So far there have been promising results in the ESL Pro League against minor teams so they should be safe from being upset by the underdogs of this tournament, especially since there is another favourite having even more of a hard time.
Virtus.Pro
Ever since the beginning of this year there has been a deep incision in Virtus.Pro’s performance, which has – for the time being – pretty much dropped them from being a serious tier one team to toying around somewhere within the tier two ranks. They are not in any way near to being able to beat a top-10 team in a serious fashion multiple times and their win over FaZe at Katowice was more a gift than hard-earned as some situations were just misplayed by their opponents, as for instance the 1v5 round in which Janusz "Snax" Pogorzelski got a ninja-defuse on the A bomb site. If there was any favourite of this group to potentially fall short to an underdog, then it would be this Polish team. Hopefully, they will show up stronger without much pressure on their shoulders.
Astralis
This Danish team has achieved much in the time it has existed up until now and in the group stages of Katowice they appeared to be the strongest team present as they secured their semi-final spot with a 5:0 direct advancement. Unfortunately they had to face Fnatic there, who are known to be their kryptonite. They managed to get one map off of them, but on the other two had to make space for a much stronger team in a slightly embarrassing not-anywhere-near-close fashion. But overall this team has looked very strong in recent time and since Fnatic is not in the mix they will definitely have a much easier time. If they are able to display the level of skill they have had lately then only Natus Vincere would be able to stop them.
Natus Vincere
Their recent performance has been somewhat of a controversy, especially at Katowice. In our team preview for Na’Vi at Katowice we already covered the fact that the team strongly depends on Ladislav “GuardiaN” Kóvacs turning up, and at that event – particularly in the quarter-finals – he just didn't. They almost lost to Brazilian underdog, Tempo Storm, who should not have been able to meet them in such a dangerous way. They managed to scrape through nonetheless and were present again for the semi-finals against Luminosity Gaming, but it was still scary to see them almost bailing out that early. This really goes to show how unpredictable their level can be and under the right circumstances they could beat Astralis, but under the wrong they could fall short to EnVyUs or even Virtus.Pro.
