Team Liquid and Virtus.pro advanced to their respective groups’ grand finals by notching victories Thursday at the BLAST Premier: Spring Groups 2024 event in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Liquid swept GamerLegion 2-0 in the Group B upper-bracket final, while Virtus.pro beat Cloud9 2-1 in Group D’s upper-bracket final.
Also Thursday, FaZe Clan beat Team Spirit and BIG defeated Heroic in a pair of lower-bracket semifinals.
Sixteen Counter-Strike 2 teams are competing this week in four groups. The four group winners will advance to the $425,000 Spring Final in London June 12-16.
The four second-place teams will meet in Sunday’s play-in stage, with the two winners advancing to the Spring Final. All matches are best-of-three.
The competition started Monday in Groups A and C. Groups B and D began play on Wednesday.
Thursday, Liquid got past GamerLegion 13-6 on Overpass and 13-7 on Mirage. Canadian Keith “NAF” Markovic had a match-high 40 kills on a plus-19 kills-to-deaths differential to lead Liquid.
GamerLegion will meet FaZe Clan in the group’s lower-bracket final. FaZe knocked out Team Spirit with 13-4 wins on Anubis and Nuke. David “frozen” Cernansky of Slovakia posted 42 kills on a plus-24 K-D for FaZe.
In Group D, Virtus.pro opened with a 13-4 triumph on Overpass, but Cloud9 responded with a 13-10 win on Anubis. The final map was Inferno, where Virtus.pro got away, 13-9. Evgenii “FL1T” Lebedev led the all-Russian victors with 43 kills on a plus-5, and Dzhami “Jame” Ali added 40 kills with a team-best plus-12.
In the lower-bracket semifinal, Heroic scored a 16-12 victory on Vertigo before BIG rallied, earning a 13-9 win on Nuke and prevailing 16-14 in overtime on Anubis. Elias “s1n” Stein and Johannes “tabseN” Wodarz of Germany led BIG with 55 kills, with s1n posting a team-high plus-8.
The group stage continues Friday with four matches:
–Team Vitality vs. Team Falcons (Group A lower-bracket final)
–GamerLegion vs. FaZe Clan (Group B lower-bracket final)
–G2 Esports vs. Ninjas in Pyjamas (Group C lower-bracket final)
–Cloud9 vs. BIG (Group D lower-bracket final)
–Field Level Media