But let’s start from the beginning. Groups A and B started about 10AM local time, and already showed a lot of familiar faces. There were no surprises as group favorites n1p (mitch, Andre, Baja, Choban, Wild_Child) and NSO (Toxi, grizine, Luci, Micko, Mescalin) have won all of their matches and together with teams PITA and Slayers advanced to the play-offs. A couple of hours later, the rest of the players arrived and it was like a déjà vu. 99% (g0g1, Buktop, PHN, Matori, CHIVAVA) and krimi rad (lead by GamersLeague player PSTM, and TIMEz0r) stomped all of their opponents. At last we saw Bans and chw securing their ways into the next round.
With all the play-offs matches being best-of-3 single elimination, the teams had to do their best, and they did. The atmosphere started to heat up and we saw some damn good games. In the first quarter finals we saw 99% dropping their first game to Slayers. Nothing to worry about though. With g0g1’s strong Morphling performance (28-0!) 99% have made the series even. Third game was just a walk in the park for them and they advanced to the next round where they met some of their old friends and team-mates n1p. Unfortunately n1p wasn’t at their best and 99% showed them who the boss was and won 2-0, both games less than 30 minutes.
On the other side of the bracket, NSO carried by grizine demolished Bans, and they were waiting for the winners of krimi rad vs. PITA. Favorites krimi rad have struggled against the tough opponents they had in PITA but in the end managed to get their way into the semi finals. And then we saw what was probably the best game of the tournament. Krimi rad had a better start to the game, which resulted in their Morphling (TIMEz0r) getting ridiculously fat. But then, Luci showed us one of the best individual plays of the day with his signature Puck. With his Dream Coil hitting people in fog and using the team fight potential of NSO (Tide, Veno, Puck, Death prophet, Chaos knight), they managed to take that game even though TIMEz0r has lead the creep score board by more than 200 creeps at the end! In the second game, NSO tried some unusual picks with Outworld Destroyer as their main carry but it didn’t work out for them, and score was 1-1. However, for the third game NSO returned to their usual play style and krimi rad had no answer for that so they had to call gg. NSO were in the finals. In the third place game we saw n1p beating krimi rad in b01, and that was the introduction to what was to come.
And there it was, the grand final! And what a final between two teams who showed the most that day; 99% vs NSO. And it didn’t start well for NSO. Probably afraid of g0g1’s Morphling they picked Antimage and abandoned their usual play style. There was a lack of communication between the team members so NSO decided to forfeit the game just under 20 minutes. They had a short break, and Toxi decided to go all or nothing. He banned out Morphling, AM, and Void (all hard carries g0g1 is good at playing) and with a strong tri-lane (Chaos Knight, Veno, Rubick) together with solo Invoker mid and Luci's Puck off-lane they just stomped 99%. Kills were all over the map and with grizine getting Heart of Tarasque and Assault Cuirass on CK in less than 30 mins it was obvious to everyone that we are going to see a third game. We have to mention that the second game was paused for almost 20 minutes because Toxi almost had a heart attack. And he continued playing! And they won! They have showed that if you shut g0g1 down, you have a big chance. Everyone was expecting a comeback, and the question was "can they pull it off?". Unfortunately, they couldn’t. It was g0g1 who didn’t let them. He picked Invoker for himself, which no one expected, and Anti-Mage for chivava. NSO managed to shut down AM early game (got his battle fury after 25min) but Invoker just went berserk. Opting for Quas/Wex his Tornado-EMP’s were spot on so he created some space for Anti-Mage to farm and eventually NSO had to call it a day.
At the end (5AM tomorrow local time!) 99% went home with the 450 euros in cash, while runner-up NSO took 150 euros. Just to mention, this is the first tournament of the BES playground series and three best placed teams are automatically invited for the next tournament so we hope we can see a lot of action like we did in the first event.
Great work by organizer BES organization, as well as RankedGaming, MyMGN and E-frag for their support. And ofcourse it's worth mentioning xtc and all the guys from Defuse for believing in this event and making it happen!
