Photo Credit: HLTV
Last weekend, Immortals triumphed over Cloud9 in the Northern Arena finals to take home the grand prize of $50,000. The tournament began with thirteen North American based teams and two Danish teams for a total of fifteen teams, after one of the teams had to drop out. The groups were played in standard tournament fashion with the three team group playing a round robin against each other. Immortals, Cloud9, Heroic, Echo Fox, OpTic, Selfless, CLG, and compLexity advanced from their respective groups.
Immortals, Cloud9, Heroic, and Echo Fox defeated the other four teams in the quarterfinals to advance to the semis, leaving OpTic, Selfless, CLG, and compLexity with the 5th-8th prize of $1,250 each. Cloud9 took on the Danish team, Heroic, in the first semifinals match. Heroic started the series off with an amazing 13-2 Terrorist half on Overpass to secure the first match of the series for themselves. This was the first map of the tournament that Cloud9 had dropped. Still, Cloud9 easily defeated Heroic on the next two maps, Mirage and Train, to advance to the grand finals.
Immortals’ opponent in the semifinals was Echo Fox, a team filled with strong fraggers. Immortals won their own map pick on Train, but dropped Echo Fox’s map choice of Nuke. This brought the series to the last map, Cache. The start of Cache was well in Echo Fox’s favor and they took quick 4-1 lead and kept the lead at 9-6 during the half. However, Immortals stormed through the Echo Fox defense as the Terrorists and won 10 straight rounds to take the game and match.
The Immortals vs Cloud9 grand finals was closely contested on all of the maps played. The first map started in the favor of Cloud9 as they took a 9-6 lead as the Terrorist on Cobblestone. Despite several Cloud9 clutches on the CT side, Immortals still broke through their defenses easily, limiting the Americans to only 3 rounds on the second half. The second map began in the favor of Immortals with them advancing to a 9-6 lead. However, the reverse of Cobblestone happened as Cloud9 limited the Brazilians to 3 rounds in the second half to take revenge on the second map. The last map, Overpass, began with a bit of controversy and confusion as one of the Immortals’ players was discovered without a headset on for the beginning of the map. The third round was replayed as a result of this, and Cloud9 somehow managed to win a round with only starting pistols. Despite Cloud9 taking a 6 round lead off the back of this, Immortals still closed the gap to 9-6 in Cloud9’s favor at the half. The second half was all Immortals as they won two five round streaks to close out the Americans, 16-11 on Overpass and win Northern Arena.
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