With just under three weeks until the playoffs, four European and two SEA participants have been decided for Synergy League. aShock, Empire, HR, VP.Polar, Invasion and Team Malaysia will all be heading to Barnaul, Russia to duke it out against each other once more.
The offline finals of Synergy League are scheduled to begin on November 28th, and we now have the six challengers that will competing for the $50,000 prizepool. Four teams from Europe, and two from SEA survived the rough round robin groupstage, and dominated the playoffs that lead to the precious ticket to Barnaul, Russia.
The European participants come from Sweden and the CIS region - aShock, Empire, Hellraisers/KPG and VP.Polar. Both Empire and afterShock managed to go through the playoffs without losing a BO3 series, while HellRaisers (not to be confused with the old HR) and VP.Polar had to survive the Lower Bracket. The "prodigies" of the tournament AlbumS and LAJONS were unable to repeat their groupstage performance and were utterly eliminated.
South East Asia on the other hand will have Team Malaysia and Invasion heading to Russia to play for their region. These two teams topped their respective groups with ease and they seemed to be the total favorites entering the playoffs. In the end, they both reached the Upper Bracket finals where Invasion took the victory with 2-1, breaking Malaysia's victory streak in the process. Nevertheless, the defeat did not stop MuShi's boys as they took down Execration and earned the trip to Russia.
With these six teams now moving forward, they will be joining NewBee and Vici Gaming from the Chinese division. This also marks the conclusion of the online phase of the tournament, so from now on all eyes will be on November 28th when the LAN Finals will be starting.
Headline image by TechLabs (flickr)
