Day 3 in the PGL Arlington Major group stage brought a couple of surprises and some much-needed hope for a few of the teams that struggled through the first days.
In Group A, OG and Soniqs were sitting dangerously low in the standings and were on the hunt for victories in order to avoid an early elimination. The former had a spectacular Day 3 where everything seemed to have clicked together.
After trying a position 4 Earthshaker during the first two days at the Major and losing with it against Team Liquid and PSG.LGD, OG have finally found their first game win with the hero against Soniqs, even though the two-game series closed with a draw. The result wasn’t ideal for either teams, especially for Sonics, who after three days in the groups are yet to land a clean 2-0 win.
However, the day continued with rather unexpected outcomes.
Soniqs surprised PSG.LGD in the first game draft with uncommon picks and outmanoeuvred them on the map with a mid lane Winter Wyvern and an Io-Bristleback safe lane duo to hand the Chinese team their first game loss in the PGL Arlington Major group stage.
Nonetheless, game two featured a hard carry Terroblade coming from PSG.LGD, who put together three strong cores with Cheng "NothingToSay" Jin Xiang on Kunnka and Zhang "Faith_bian" Ruida on Death Prophet to be able to outlast the same Briste-Io duo from Soniqs and even out the series. Although it was yet another 1-1 score for the NA representative, the fourth draw result keeps Soniqs tied with Thunder Awaken and Team Liquid for the sixth place in the group.
OG, on the other hand, scored a clinical 2-0 victory over Royal Never Give Up in a series that pitted Anathan "ana" Pham and Sébastien "Ceb" Debs against each other for the first time ever.
Both players are at the Major as stand-ins, ana for RNG and Ceb for OG, which made the confrontation between the two teams a real treat to watch. Unfortunately, the games didn’t last too long for the fans to fully enjoy the battle between the two TI champions.
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Royal Never Give Up
Royal Never Give UpGame one went down in just 23 minutes, as OG brought back Ammar "ATF" Al-Assaf’s Underlord. RNG used five of their seven bans to block some of Ammar’s best heroes, but they got seriously outplayed by OG, who made perfect use of their global map presence with the Underords’ ultimate and team fight control provided by Earthshaker, Chen and Io.
Game two concluded even faster and brought the earliest GG call at the Major so far. RNG tapped out at the 12-minute mark after realizing that giving 8 kills to Ammar on Monkey King in the first 7 minutes of the game was way too much to attempt a recovery.
In Group B, Team Aster became the first competitor at the Major to have secured themselves an upper bracket start in the playoffs with 3 clean victories and 3 draws. Their latest victim is Tundra, who are at the very bottom of the group with 3 draws and 3 losses.
PGL Arlington Major group stage matches will resume today, August 7 at 10:00 local time/17:00 CEST with the teams from Group A opening Day 4.
