BLAST Premier Fall Showdown 2022: Heroic and Fluxo go to Fall Finals

BLAST Premier Fall Showdown took place in two regions: Europe and America. Each region received one ticket to BLAST Premier Fall Finals and the winners were a bit unexpected.

In Europe, every statistic indicated Team Vitality as the most likely winner. They were ranked the number-one team in the world and had relatively easy opponents to defeat. But they proved unable to deliver.

In America, Evil Geniuses, Complexity Gaming, and 00 Nation were the big favorites and everyone was convinced that EG would emerge victorious. Instead, the tournament was won by Fluxo, a team led by Joao “felps” Vasconcellos, a former SK Gaming member who won multiple S-tier trophies with this team. This happened back in 2017.

Results in Europe

In the European Showdown, the only question in people’s minds was this: Vitality or Heroic? Who will qualify for the Fall Finals? Ultimately, it turned out that Heroic were the better team. But we would have liked to see a Grand Final between these two favorites, just to be certain.

Instead, Astralis were the other finalist. The Danish team, led by Lukas “gla1ve” Rossander, bested Vitality in the semifinals despite being one map down. Their victories on Dust II (16-9) and Inferno (16-8) were very convincing.

From the outside, you would think that a team like Vitality would have no problem beating a team like Astralis, who had just gone through a last-minute roster change. But it seems that CS:GO is a complex game that permits such occurrences.

In the Grand Final, Astralis narrowly lost the first map (20-22 on Ancient) and then lost the second map as well: 10-16 on Nuke.

Results in America

In the American Showdown, it quickly became apparent that many teams were more focused on the upcoming IEM Rio Major than on this tournament. Or perhaps they did train specifically for their BLAST Premier opponents, but those teams proved to be much stronger than they anticipated.

Fluxo didn’t just win one big match at this event. They won several of them and in some cases, they did it convincingly. Their first battle should have gotten them eliminated. Evil Geniuses had qualified for the IEM Rio Major with a record of 3 W – 0 L, so what chance did they have? But the final score was 2-1 in Fluxo’s favor.

The second match was against 00 Nation, who also qualified for the IEM Rio Major and are currently led by two of the best Brazilian CS:GO players: Epitacio “TACO” de Melo and Marcelo “coldzera” David. Fluxo won without dropping a single map: 16-11 on Ancient and 16-10 on Mirage.

In the Grand Final, Flux had a tough match against MIBR but managed to win with a score of 2-1. Thanks to this victory, they will have the opportunity to participate in a $425.000 event in November, just one week after the IEM Rio Major.

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