Our CS:GO team has brought home their second international title of the year in Jönköping, Sweden by beating Bravado 2-0 (16-9, 16-5) in the grand finals. Bravado was the surprise team at the event and the first ever South African team to make a deep run at an international tournament of this scale.
Early struggles transformed to a championship run
The team started their run at the tournament by losing the first match, and the opening map of the following elimination series. First one in a nail biting 14-16 loss to a newly made French G2 Esports roster, after a dramatic turn of events. We were up 11-4 after the first half of Dust2, but unfortunately the clutches went in the favor of the Frenchmen throughout the second half of the affair, putting us at the brink of elimination. In our elimination game against another strong team, Danish OpTic Gaming, we had a slow start and took a 13-16 loss on Nuke to start the Best of 3 series.
As the series went to Train and with the team facing elimination, ENCE took the reins and showed why Train is a map the team likes to pick in these series. A 16-11 victory on Train was followed by a more dominant victory in the deciding map Dust2 -- where we managed a comfortable 9-6 lead on the CT-side to help us take the map 16-9 and the series overall 2-1 to progress in to the decider series for a rematch against G2 Esports.
Determined after their initial loss against G2 Esports, the rematch was all about getting a revenge and showing which of the teams is truly better. ENCE got into the game instantly, and the first map Mirage resulted in a relatively comfortable 16-11 victory. It was Jani "Aerial" Jussila who stood out in the map by adding 26 frags to his tally. Moving on to Overpass, things started well once again for ENCE, but G2 wasn't going to give up without a fight.
The game went all the way to 29 rounds, where a force-buying G2 took the right gamble and stacked the B bombsite, which ENCE was attacking. A back and forth fight ended up with allu and shox in a 1on1, where our very own captain came out on top with just 3hp left, clinching the victory with a 16-13 scoreline and 2-0 overall. Aleksi "allu" Jalli was the man of the hour on Overpass, getting crucial AWP kills throughout the map, for a massive 32 frag, +15 K-D performance.
Third day of the event saw us face a red hot Heroic in the semi-finals. The Nordic team had just come off of a win at Toyota Master Bangkok 2018. We were in the driver's seat throughout the series however, and kept the Danes and Swedes under control. On both of the maps, Nuke and Train, Heroic managed to stay in the game in the early parts, but we managed to run away with the scoreline before the halfway mark. With decisive scorelines of 16-7 on Train and 16-9 on Nuke, we booked ourselves a spot in the grand finals. Worth noting is Jere "sergej" Salo's phenomenal performance in the series, racking up 52 kills over the course of the two maps.
Bringing the trophy home
In the grand finals we were put up against Bravado, a South African team that hadn't lost a single map in the tournament thus far. An underdog team that virtually no one had expected to make it through the groups had made their way to play for the championship title. Our team was determined to make things right for what happened at DreamHack Open Montreal, where we took a heart-breaking loss against Polish Kinguin in the grand final.
We were able to pace the game correctly and not get surprised by Bravado. The first map Train saw a few half-buys and ecos won by both sides, but ultimately ENCE was in control of the narrative throughout the majority of the map and took the win 16-9. Moving on to Inferno, the game was taken in full control by our team. A dominant 14-1 CT-side was the result of smart aggression, particularly in banana, where Bravado kept trying to gain map control without much luck. In the second half, the South African team managed a pistol round win and a couple of round wins to follow it up -- but then our team took the two terrorist-side rounds with routine to close out the match and clinch the championship.
This victory marks the second international title for ENCE in just a couple of months, as we took the first ever premier international title won by a Finnish team at StarSeries i-League Season 6 in October. This was a fantastic way for the team to close out their 2018 in terms of LAN-events and a well needed confidence boost as the qualification stages for the Major begin shortly after.
Final Standings
ENCE - $50,000
Bravado - $20,000
Heroic - $10,000
x6tence Galaxy - $10,000
compLexity - $3,000
G2 Esports - $3,000- LDLC - $2,000
- OpTic Gaming - $2,000
