G2 Esports sent Astralis home today in the Danish CS:GO team’s first event since the departure of Nicolai “dev1ce” Reedtz. G2 will move on to the semifinals of the DreamHack Masters Spring event, where IEM Katowice winners Gambit await them.
G2 made the most of their Train strats, given that they’ll be useless in a short amount of time. They closed out the final three rounds of their T-side half, then won all eight of their CT rounds to finish map one. Nikola “NiKo” Kovač was tremendous from start to finish with four of his 21 kills coming in the closing round.
On Nuke, the map went back and forth throughout both sides before Astralis capitalized on some G2 mistakes late in the second half to squeak out a 16-14 win. This sent the series to Vertigo, where G2 had another solid T-side start similar to Train, consistently taking sites and keeping the Astralis economy weakened. Astralis could only muster a few more rounds and G2 closed out the series 2-1, taking Vertigo 16-8.
Both teams are still experimenting with relatively recent roster moves. At the beginning of March, G2 moved AWPer Kenny “kennyS” Schrub to the inactive roster, added Audric “JaCkz” Jug back to the starting lineup, and moved NiKo to the AWP/rifler hybrid role. G2 have been playing quite well since Dot Esports talked to NiKo back at the BLAST Spring Showdown, showing signs of that consistency that their star player said they needed to establish.
Astralis are just a handful of series into the post-dev1ce era. They won a best-of-one against Extra Salt, beat Complexity 2-0, lost 2-0 to Heroic, and now have lost 2-1 to G2. Outside of their loss to Heroic, Lucas “Bubzkji” Andersen has been in terrific form since returning to the starting roster.
