ESL Pro League Season 5 – A Preview of the Dallas Finals
ESL Pro League Season 5 comes to an end this weekend with finals taking place on the 3rd and 4th June. The finals will take place at the Verizon Theatre in Dallas where finalists will compete for a share of $750,000. 1st place will take home $225,000, 2nd place will take $100,000 and 3rd/4th will take $60,000 each.
With ESL One Cologne, ECS and the PGL Major just around the corner, these finals will act as a taste of what we have to come in the following weeks. There’s been a noticeable lack of offline events recently but these finals should be a treat for CS:GO around the globe.
Six teams remain ahead of this weekends final. Here’s a run-down of what we’ve seen so far and what’s to come!
The Tournament So Far
German side Mousesports and the Danish players of North have been the strongest teams so far this tournament. Both teams from Group B have only lost 1 match each and won 4, pushing 3 points above any team in Group A.
Having not played an offline tournament since StarSeries at the beginning of April, Fnatic struggled to keep up and were eventually knocked out in an MR3 overtime format match against SK. Other teams to lose out include Immortals, Cloud9, OpTic, Natus Vincere and NRG.
The MR3 overtime format saw some another interesting result. Frenchmen EnVyUs took a 4-1 win over Brazilian side SK.
On June 1st, SK play Mousesports in a BO3 whereby the winner will advance to the semi-finals. After sealing a sponsorship deal with Vodafone, Mousesports have performed surprisingly well with 4 consecutive wins, only after a close overtime loss to North. On the other hand, SK have had a tough time against French sides EnVyUs and G2.
In a similar situation EnVyUs will play the NA side, Liquid. EnVyUs have performed particularly well, especially against Brazilian teams SK and Immortals where they secured 16-3 and 16-2 wins respectively.
The Finals
On the 3rd June, G2 will play the winners of the Mousesports vs SK match in another BO3. G2 should be feeling confident if they have to play SK after their 16-6 win on Cobblestone. Despite having a fairly difficult time in recent games, SK should feel comfortable in knowing their closest rivals, Astralis and FaZe won’t be playing in the finals.
Later on in the evening, North will play the winners of EnVyuS and Liquid. Liquid managed to take a win over North last night with a 16-10 win on Cobblestone. EnVyuS haven’t actually played North since mid March, although they did lose on both of those occasions 17-19 and 13-16.
This tournament looks wide open for the taking, with early knock-outs of previous champions Fnatic and SK looking weaker than normal. Certainly, the absence of Astralis and FaZe have given opportunity to lower ranked teams. However, there doesn’t seem to be any major underdog left to play in the final stages.
