The fourth round of the double elimination bracket for the ESL One qualifier is around the corner. After it finishes, two out of the three EU teams going to the lan finals will be decided.
Alliance vs Na'Vi and Asus.Polar vs Empire will be the deciding match ups for the two out of three teams who proceed and have a shot at the $250 000 base price pool. But before the fourth round of the winner bracket takes place, the lower bracket's will be played; eight teams will be trying to fight for their survival and have a shot to get the one invitation slot to the LAN finals open to them.
Looking at the lower bracket, there is a clear favorite in every one of the match ups with all of them being teams of veteran player against teams of aspiring players, for example, Cloud9 vs Vega where Cloud9 has the highly experienced players such as Jacky 'EternalEnvy' Mao; with the situation being so, the teams of aspiring players will be looking to pull upsets against the more experienced teams to prove themselves. Not an impossible task as squads like Vega and Elysium Gaming both have pulled upsets against HellRaisers (2-0) and PowerRangers (2-0) in the past two weeks.
On the flip side of the coin the experienced teams will want to convincingly defeat their enemy to show that they can keep up a consistent performance, building a case for themselves to receive a TI5 invite. In the case of both NiP, they want to show to Valve that they have the potential to take down the strongest teams in the EU scene, particularly Empire and Asus.Polar which have beaten NiP 1-2 and 0-2 in their recent matches.
As for the winners bracket which will be played in a few days, Alliance and Empire are looking to be in the best shape for proceed. Alliance is the favored team against Na`Vi because of their strong recent performance with a 10/2 win loss this month and their recent 2-0 win against Na'Vi recently in The Summit 3 qualifiers. Empire on the other hand are looking slightly better than Asus.Polar because of their strong momentum, having 14 wins this month compared to Asus.Polar's four. However it is worth pointing out that Polar just beat Empire earlier 2-0 earlier today in The Summit.
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