After a full day of action in Malta, NAVI and MOUZ have punched their tickets to the ESL Pro League Season 18 Grand Finals with victories in the semifinal round.
NAVI scored a 2-0 victory over Monte, but it was a close affair. Monte scored twelve rounds on Anubis and raced to a 9-6 on Mirage before NAVI stormed back on the CT side on Anubis, winning 10 rounds to one to close out the series.
MOUZ’s victory over ENCE was a much closer affair. The best-of-three ended 2-1, with MOUZ needing a stellar CT half on Nuke to finally pull through. MOUZ took Mirage, the first map, 16-13, followed by an ENCE 16-11 win on Vertigo after a stellar T half. MOUZ then thrashed ENCE on Nuke, one of their best maps.
The final promises to be an exciting affair: NAVI boasts some of Counter-Strike‘s biggest stars, like Oleksandr “s1mple” Kostyliev, while MOUZ’s in-game leader, Kamil “siuhy” Szkaradek, took his GamerLegion team to the grand finals of the BLAST Paris Major just months ago. Both teams have made great runs in the tournament thus far: NAVI hasn’t dropped a single map. MOUZ took an early 1-2 loss to MIBR, but since then, has only dropped maps against a star-studded G2 and ENCE.
NAVI and MOUZ will square off for the lion’s share of the $850,000 prize pool and the honor of being the last Pro League champions in the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive era. Future Pro League competitions will be held on the newly-released CS2. While there is no clear timeline as to exactly when the switch will be made for other tournament organizers, all future ESL competitions will be on CS2. It’s almost time for the new era of the esport, and there’s potential for tomorrow’s matchup to be the last one of its kind in the history of Global Offensive.
Published: Sep 30, 2023 04:52 pm