Cats Gaming barely reaching G1-Spring Playoffs

Cats Gaming has been the standout team of the CIS region for the past year with three consecutive G1-Series tournament championships and appearances at DreamHack Winter 2012 and the Garena Star League 2013. Now the team barely avoided a disaster in the latest edition of the prestigious G1-Spring. 

It's not even two month ago, when Cats Gaming bullied their competition in the G1-Winter to win a total of $3,000 USD. In that Winter edition of the tournament Cats only suffered defeat once, while steamrolling all other challenges with ease. It even came to the extend that the CIS flagship team did not lose a match in the playoffs to capture their third consecutive G1-Series Championship. This might change now.

With a combined record of only three wins, three ties and one loss the former dominant team of the region has lost some of it's "invincible" aura and is back to reality. They only got the #4 seed in the upcoming playoffs and have to fight an uphill battle - starting with the clash against the strong iTS.

Said iTS squad is looking to fill the void on top of the CIS division after a near flawless group stage with "Cats like" numbers of six victories and only one tie against Load. The team went through ups and downs in the recent future with results ranging from a second place finish in the first CIS/EU Showmatch tournament, to a utterly disappointing G1-Winter when they didn't manage to get out of the group stage. 

Completing the Final Four of the tournament are the young teams of SW4G and TIIIIM. Both teams are fairly new to the CIS scene, but their members have been around the block a couple of months now. Most prominent in this bunch is MoscowDog (also known as Zulu4), who was one of the five players that represented the CIS region in the first ever DreamHoN Summer 2012 World Cup as a part of GA.ru. He might bring his team in a position to repeat history and once again earn the ticket to Sweden.

Last but not least is SW4G, one of the emerging forces from Russia. The team has shown great results lately in the G7-Series tournaments, winning one of those against stiff competition like Load, Cats Gaming, iTS and QaM. They raised some heads with that result and a second place finish in the group stage of G1-Spring is solidifying their aim for greatness even further. They only suffered defeat at the hands of iTS and tied against Cats Gaming on the opening day of the tournament - the rest of the matches all went in their favor. Can they upset iTS?

The brackets are up and now the quest for the DreamHack Summer 2013 ticket goes into the final stage with the first round of the playoffs being played this Friday, May 10th. After that the Semifinals in both the Lower Bracket and the Upper Bracket are being played May 11th, with the Grand Final being held May 12th. After that we know which CIS team will represent the great region in the upcoming DreamHoN Summer 2013.

Source: garena.ru