Since September 5, 16 of the best teams in the world have been facing up in the New Challengers group stage at the FACEIT Major in London. All 16 of these teams have fought their way into this tournament through qualifiers or performances in past Majors, and with $1,000,000 on the line in prize money, nobody is going down without a fight.
There are still two more days of activity to happen over the weekend before the New Challenger Stage comes to an end. Here is a look back at the results for the past few days and a look ahead at the upcoming matches.
© FACEIT | Valve Corporation
We are now three days in and teams are looking to complete their third match. This will be the first time in this stage that teams are given the chance to qualify for the next stage or the potential to drop out of the event entirely.
At the top end, we’ve already seen our top performers NiP and Team Liquid go 3-0 each so far earlier today. Both of these teams have now qualified for the next stage. Next we have Astralis and Vega, who has a 2-1 scoreline.
In the middle, the following teams are 1-1 and are yet to play their third game.
At the bottom end of the spectrum, we have the 0-2 teams close to falling out of the event entirely.
So who’s up next? First, we need to make it through the remainder of the round three matches today. Here is the list for today’s matches.
After today’s matches, out of the 12 teams listed above, 10 will go onto the round 4 matches, which will happen on Saturday.
On Saturday, 6 more teams will drop out when they lose, which will leave Sunday, where the final 6 teams will fight it out in a new best of three systems.
© FACEIT | Valve Corporation
There’s a lot at stake for the Challenger’s Stage. If a team gets through this stage, they’ll be the New Legends, which means next Major they’ll automatically be invited and they’ll also get that sweet, sweet sticker money just for showing up.
So far, things have mostly gone as expected, although NiP did pull a surprise win against Astralis in a long-winded game that went into overtime multiple times. Despite Astralis’ loss, they have still played incredibly well throughout the rest of the event, as expected. Team Liquid has also done very well, pulling out three quick and easy wins against OpTic, HellRaisers, and Vega Squadron. What was very unexpected was North’s poor performance, going 2-0 against HellRaisers and Team Spirit. It was just last week that North won the 1st place against Astralis in DreamHack Masters Stockholm.
Pretty much everything else has happened as expected so far. What are your thoughts on the Major so far? Are you excited for the month ahead?
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