Team Falcons end Day 1 of Riyadh Masters group stage with zero wins

^{headline picture credits: Brandon Dowling|ESL}

Home town heroes at Riyadh Masters 2024, Team Falcons debut at Esports World Cup with a disastrous first day in the group stage.

Team Falcons came into the Riyadh Masters 2024 as one of the two favourites at the title. They are the ESL Pro Tour leaderboard top placed team and one of the first teams to have claimed their spot in the tournament after a dominant EPT season.

Coming into Riyadh, Falcons have four championship titles at tier one events under their belt, while Gaimin Gladiators, their adversaries for the last series of the day, are hungry for revenge. The Western European team had a phenomenal run in 2023, claiming all three Major titles in the Dota Pro Circuit, however, 2024 brought a lot of subpar results. They reached the grand finals of only one tournament so far and are yet to lift a trophy.

Riyadh Masters at Esports World Cup is the place where they look for redemption, but the group play opened with another tough loss. They got upset 2-0 by Heroic. At the same time, Falcons had also lost their opening series, against Team Spirt, the other favourite at the title in Riyadh.

• Read more: Team Spirit outplay Falcons at Riyadh Masters 2024 while Heroic keep the upsets rolling

So, the direct confrontation between Falcons and Gaimin came with a lot on the line and put both teams on the edge right from the start. Neither could afford to lose another game.

Gaimin GladiatorsvsTeam Falcons

Last year, when Gaimin Gladiators felt untouchable, one of their strongest strategies relied on auras stacking. Through the multiple patches since 2023, the auras kept getting nerfed. Some may say it was also a direct nerf to GG, who are in pursuit of another tournament victory since October  2023. Nonetheless, for game one against Falcons, Gaimin came prepared with an unusual draft and a double down on the aura stacking strat.  They ran an offlane Venomancer with a Monkey King to secure his lane from position 4, while their position 5 support was a Chen. Between Venom and Chen, Gaimin Gladiators built every possible aura item to overpower Falcons’s deadly Gyrocopter-Tiny-Razor trio core. 

From Pipe of Insight and Boots of Bearing, Vlads, Greaves, Shiva’s and Assault Cuirass, Gaimin have carefully optimized their item builds one each hero adding a Linken’s, a Manta Style and had perfect map movements to give Falcons no chance in the game.

Heading into the second game, GG imposed a fast paced Dota with a Broodmother carry and a Quinn Callahan signature Pangolier. Quinn got a perfect laning stage that allowed GG to snowball out of control and score their first clean 2-0 win at Riyadh Masters 2024

For the home town heroes, Team Falcons, the result sends them to the drawing board as they end Day 1 at the very bottom of their group with a completely unexpected 0-4 game score. 

Day 2 will bring only one series for the teams in Group A. Falcons will be pitted against Aurora while Gaimin will play against the defending champions, Team Spirit.

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