After nearly two months of competing in the Friday Fortnite tournaments, Tyler “Ninja” Blevins has finally claimed victory in the $20,000 competition alongside former Halo teammate Jacob “Hysteria” Reiser with a grand finals victory over FaZe Clan’s top players.
Despite finishing within the top 10 in nearly every event, Ninja had failed to win any of the previous six tournaments he competed in. A few weeks ago, while teaming with Team Envy’s KingRichard, he reached the grand finals before falling to FaZe’s Turner “Tfue” Tenney and Dennis “Cloak” Lepore, who won the first of their three titles.
This week saw another grand finals meeting between Ninja and the FaZe pair. But this time, the roles were reversed as Ninja’s team battled through the losers bracket, while FaZe waited hours to see who they’d face in the last matchup of the day.
The teams started off the series pretty evenly, with the four players combining for 33 kills. FaZe, with a one-kill lead and so much tournament experience, looked poised to close out the series and send the streamer home without a championship—but Ninja wasn’t going down without an enormous fight.
Finishing with 15 kills, Ninja led his team to a victory in the first grand finals series, but it also took a fairly early death from Tfue, who was carrying his team’s killing load at the time of his death. This win reset the bracket, making the next series the final one of the tournament.
Both teams slayed in nearly flawless fashion, but the challengers took the lead. For many, the 22-16 score would seem like a comfortable lead heading into the second game, but with the skill of Tfue and Cloak on the other side, Ninja and Hysteria knew it wasn’t going to be easy.
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Fortunately for Ninja and his many fans, Tfue and Cloak both went down early in the game in an attempt to be aggressive, resulting in an automatic win for the face of Twitch. The win earned Ninja and Hysteria $10,000, while FaZe received $7,000 for their second-place finish. Sypher “SypherPK” Ali and Brendan “Jaomock” O’Brien, who finished in third, walked away with $3,000 as well.
Heading into today’s tournament, the FaZe duo won three out of the previous seven events, including last week’s, making it look relatively easy against some of the most popular and talented players in all of Fortnite. In this week’s tournament, they took out the likes of Jimmy “HighDistortion” Moreno, Caesar “CDNThe3rd” Noriega, and TSM’s Daequan Loco en route to the grand finals.
While they won’t be walking away with the championship this week, they’ll surely be gunning for the top spot once again when the teams come back together for the ninth Friday Fortnite tournament.
