1win are the winners of BetBoom Playlist.Freedom

BetBoom Playlist.Freedom is over and the winner of this $150.000 CS:GO tournament was 1win. This team is clearly on its way to becoming a tier-1 competitor that can realistically challenge the likes of Astralis and Ninjas in Pyjamas.

One of the reasons why 1win are strong at the moment is that one of their players is Kirill “Boombl4” Mikhaylov, the former IGL of Natus Vincere. His reputation might be completely disastrous at the moment but his CS:GO skills are certainly exceptional.

Since he joined 1win, the rest of the team has figured out that he’s the perfect guy for the IGL role. In just three and a half months, Boombl4 managed to turn 1win into a very strong tier-2 team that has the potential to enter the top 20 if everyone is dedicated enough and determined to reach this objective.

1win’s run at BetBoom Playlist.Freedom

1win struggled in the Swiss stage, losing against Spirit Academy and 9Pandas. They had to beat 00 Prospects, BIG, and 00 Nation to advance to the playoffs. There, their first match was against Looking4Org. And it proved to be a serious challenge for them. The scores were 9-16 on Nuke and 14-16 on Vertigo.

The French side played really well and had two players that finished with more than 40 kills, but 1win’s players were better overall. Apart from Denis “deko” Zhukov, who seems to be a better fragger than the rest of the squad, everyone contributed in equal amounts.

1win went on to defeat SAW in the semifinals: 16-14 on Nuke and 16-9 on Overpass. This match showed once again that deko is a high caliber player. His K-D score was 49-30, by far the best on the server.

In the Grand Final, 1win lost the first map, Overpass, against Aurora, after overtime: 19-17. But on Nuke (12-16) and Inferno (11-16), they were significantly better. Fortunately for 1win, two players stepped up and offered deko a lot of help.

Igor “Forester” Bezotecheskiy had a K-D score of 72-53, while Aurora’s best player, Aleksandr “KENSI” Gurkin, had a score of 56-62.

Thanks to this result, 1win received $80.000 and will climb significantly in the global rankings. Pretty soon, if they can win some qualifiers, they might start competing more regularly in S-tier tournaments. In the qualifiers for the Paris Major they finished 12^th-14^th, so they were quite close to playing at the Major.

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