Ninjas in Pyjamas beat Astralis 2-1 today in the DreamHack Masters Spring Europe lower bracket playoffs.
The Ninjas were down 15-10 on Overpass, the last map of the series. But they survived and won the game in double overtime.
This CS:GO match was the last one Astralis will play with stand-in player Marco “Snappi” Pfeiffer since the Danes don’t have any event scheduled for the next few weeks. Astralis has decided to skip cs_summit six, the second Regional Major Ranking (RMR) tournament of the year, which will kick off on June 24.
This may have been Astralis’ best series with this lineup, though, since they put up a good fight against NiP. The Swedes took the first map, Train, 16-12. NiP’s CT-side was better than Astralis’ and Nicolas “Plopski” Zamora shined with 29 kills.
On Nuke, however, Astralis dominated NiP from the beginning, winning 11 rounds on their T-side, which is considered the weakest side of the map. With such a huge advantage, it only took nine rounds for the Danes to close out the map 16-8 in their favor. Dupreeh and device fragged the most with 21 kills each.
Astralis had Overpass in their grasp despite their terrible start (down 8-2). They almost won the game with just pistols and one AWP in regulation. But NiP fought their way back into the game with a huge contribution from Simon “twist” Eliasson, who had some clutches and finished with 37 frags, one less than device.
Although the Ninjas moved forward today, they may struggle against more consolidated teams. The Swedes changed the whole structure of their roster last month when they replaced Jonas “Lekr0” Olofson with new in-game leader Hampus Poser.
NiP will face Vitality tomorrow at 10:50am CT for the second round of the DreamHack Masters Spring Europe lower bracket.
