Esports Championship Series: Season 7 Finals

The wonderful SSE Arena in Wembley will be the home to the top 8 teams from Europe and North America as they battle for $500,000 in winnings at the ECS Season 7 Finals.

The participating teams had to go through a qualifier phase in both EU and NA on three separate occasions in order to determine the six main participants. One more team from each region was also granted an invite based on the “most earnings generated” criteria. The eight contestants are then split into two double-elimination groups.

Group A features the two time ECS Champions and top seed Astralis facing FURIA in the opener. Astralis has been absent in LAN competitions for over a month, as they did not participate at IEM Sydney, cs_summit 4 or DreamHack Masters Dallas. This in turn gave way to Team Liquid to snatch the Global #1 seed from them, and also created a situation where Astralis has to fight for the throne once again. Victory for Astralis at this event still won’t give them the edge over Liquid but might set up an interesting duel for the throne at either the ESL Pro League Season 7 Finals or ESL One Cologne this summer. FURIA on the other hand has shown a lot of improvement over the last month which culminated in a tense semifinal at DH Masters Dallas against Liquid last week. They will have to dominate Astralis in the opener in order to set the tone for the event as a whole.

The second matchup in Group A is none other than the Ninjas in Pyjamas and NRG. Both teams were part of the recent Dallas event but did not meet due to bracketing. In fact, the last time this two teams met was at IEM Katowice way back in February. Both teams peaked at about #4^th in the global seeding around that time and have both been on a downward path ever since. This will be a match between equals that only map chose should decide.

Group B is arguably the weaker group at the event. The opener will feature Vitality versus Complexity, while the second matchup features North and MIBR. As predicted, Vitality did have a good showing at Dallas, but couldn’t overcome FURIA in the quarterfinals. We haven’t seen much of Complexity lately as they are only involved with the North American part of ESL Pro League Season 9, furthermore they only made it to this event as a substitute for Rogue who disbanded their roster earlier this year. With Complexity being arguably the weakest team at the event the path for Vitality is wide open.

The second match in this group between North and MIBR should be an interesting show for the spectators. The Brazilians have a better seed and perform a lot better than North this year. Yet, North has come ahead in both matches against mibr this year and even in win percentages, the Danes have the edge on every map except Mirage.

In recap, both of the teams that have beat Astralis this season (ENCE, Liquid) are not attending this event. This should make things fairly comfortable for them as they build their path to the top of the CS:GO rankings in 2019. It is likely they will be the winners of the eSport Championship Series for the third consecutive time.

The first batch of matches kicks off Thursday, June 6^th, 11:00AM CEST at Twitch.tv/faceittv

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