The final Lower Bracket game of day one of the main event would see two massive teams clash in an elimination contest. Team Liquid and Natus Vincere; one team would say goodbye to their TI6 chances in this best of one play-off.
With the game starting off it was Na’Vi who claimed a rather quick first blood just before two minutes had passed. Ivan 'Artstyle' Antonov made a good rotation into the bot lane, claiming the kill and getting denied to neutral creeps. With ten minutes passed, Na’Vi still controlled the game, with a 5-3 kill score and a tier one tower downed in the bot lane.
The first major team fight broke out as Na’Vi aggressively chased down heroes between Liquid’s tier one and two towers mid. With both teams expending a multitude of spells the kill count was three each, but Liquid getting Track kills made the trade more favourable for them. The first aegis of the game went the way of Na’Vi and was completely uncontested but the game was beginning to get tougher for them as the pace slowed down and Liquid began to take objectives and starve the Dire team of any openings.
Twenty seven minutes in and Team Liquid once again took a team fight as Lasse 'Matumbaman' Urpalainen utilised the Naga Siren ultimate to cancel the Chromosphere initiation. With this win, Liquid claimed complete control and pushed straight down mid lane and attempted to claim the barracks. Even though the barracks were saved, Na’Vi used buybacks and needed to take an objective as they moved into the Rosh pit. But this was a bad idea as Liquid found them and stopped the attempt before completing their destruction of the mid barracks.
Seeing their chance, Liquid pushed in through the bot lane and claimed the barracks there too. With two sets of barracks down, the game looked all but over for Na’Vi with thirty four minutes passed. And only a minute later, Liquid wiped the Na’Vi team off the map and forced the GG call out.
With that, Team Liquid kept their hopes alive in TI6 - but sadly Natus Vincere will be eliminated.
Tomorrow will see more upper and lower bracket games as we'll see more teams eliminated and a whole new day of teams playing their hearts out to stay alive at TI6.
