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ENCE and MOUZ win group B of IEM Katowice

fragster Radu M. 6. February 2024

ENCE and MOUZ were certainly not the teams we would have put in the upper bracket Final of group B ahead of IEM Katowice 2024. Neither of them seemed capable of achieving greatness at this tournament and it seemed that the favorites would simply overwhelm them.

But to everyone’s surprise, both of them managed to defeat strong opponents and qualify for the playoffs. In ENCE’s case, their path to the upper bracket Final was nothing short of a miracle.

Group B results

Group B of IEM Katowice features teams like Team Vitality, G2 Esports, Heroic, and Cloud9. Winning against this opposition requires tremendous competence. ENCE not only won twice, but they did it against Vitality, the highest-ranked team in the world at the moment, and G2 Esports, who are currently ranked 6th in the world.

Another thing worth mentioning is that ENCE had to go through the play-in stage, in which they won against Astralis. So it seems that the signing of gla1ve has had a major impact on the team’s success.

It’s difficult to attribute the results obtained by ENCE in the first two group stage matches to anyone else. Sure, some of the team members, such as hades, had off-the-charts performances. But someone still needs to be the mastermind and find winning strategies against the world’s greatest IGLs and rosters.

ENCE’s match against Vitality had these scores: 6 – 13 on Vertigo, 13 – 4 on Anubis, and 8 – 13 on Nuke. Gla1ve, unlike many IGLs in CS2, did more than was expected of him and finished the match with a score of 36 – 38. For Vitality, both ZywOo and flameZ played really well, but Spinx had a weak performance for some reason.

In the second match, against G2 Esports, victory came with far less effort than anticipated: 13 – 8 on Mirage and 13 – 7 on Anubis. The main reason why G2 lost was huNter-’ abysmal performance: 14 – 32. Everyone else played reasonably well, even though HooXi also had a -10 score.

For ENCE, Kylar was the best player, followed by Goofy and hades. It seems that the Polish players who were acquired from 9INE are actually much stronger than was previously thought. All they lacked while representing the Polish organization was a strong IGL. With gla1ve on their team, they seem to be performing miracles every game.

As for MOUZ, they defeated Cloud (1 – 2) and GamerLegion (2 – 0). Both times, they struggled, so they’re not on ENCE’s level and will likely lose the upper bracket Final.

Header: ESL