Astralis have guaranteed the first seed of BLAST Premier Fall Groups’ Group A following a nail-biter 19-17 victory against Vitality today in the group final.
The all-Danish CS:GO squad had a tough start in the competition, having lost 16-10 to Ninjas in Pyjamas in the opening round. Astralis recovered in the lower bracket of the group, though, posting wins against OG (16-9) and NiP (16-9) before getting to play Vitality in the group final.
Astralis were considered the underdogs against Vitality, considering how well Mathieu “ZywOo” Herbaut and crew had been playing throughout the day. The group final was a back-and-forth battle on Mirage, in which Astralis finished on top thanks to their collective effort. The AWPer Asger “Farlig” Jensen got the most kills on Astralis (29) but Andreas “Xyp9x” Højsleth was equally important, having finished with 26 kills, in addition to the best highlight of the match: a quad kill while holding the B bombsite.
Benjamin “blameF” Bremer, one of Astralis’ stars, was happy with the victory over Vitality but said the team need to watch out for the mistakes they have committed, especially early in the day.
“I’m happy with the result but I still think there is a lot of stuff that we need to fix and improve,” blameF said in a post-match interview with James Banks. “[There are] a lot of mistakes that we shouldn’t commit. It would be nice if we didn’t do that because that can be a bit stressful sometimes. But yeah, of course I’m happy. I don’t think we expected to go through first in this group and also a lot of people said we got lucky in IEM Cologne (Note: Astralis finished top four at that tournament), so it felt good to show that we might not be number four in the world but we can still beat the top 10 teams.”
The Group A action is finished and Astralis, Vitality, NiP, and OG will return to BLAST Premier Fall Groups’ servers only in the knockout stage next week, in which six of the 12 teams in attendance will qualify for the Fall Finals in November. The tournament will resume tomorrow with Natus Vincere, G2, Team Liquid, and Complexity playing in Group B.
Here are all the results of Group A.
