ESL Challenger Katowice 2023 group stage results

The group stage of ESL Challenger Katowice finished with unsurprising results. In both groups, the best teams advanced to the playoffs. It was, however, interesting to see Virtus.pro playing better than ENCE, a team that recently won IEM Dallas.

The stakes of the tournament are high. Apart from the $50.000 prize that will be offered to the winner, there’s also a qualification spot for ESL Pro League S18 to be won.

Group A results

In group A of ESL Challenger Katowice, ENCE and Virtus.pro started with well-deserved victories against Bravado and Partyz. In VP’s case, the battle was harder than they had hoped and finished with a score of 16-13 on Inferno.

The winners match was the most important one of the group. Two even halves pushed this match into overtime, where Virtus.pro defeated ENCE 19-17, largely thanks to the performance of Dzhami “Jame” Ali (28-16) and Evgenii “FL1T” Lebedev (30-18).

In the decider match, ENCE defeated Partyz with a score of 2-0 and qualified for the playoffs as the runner-up.

.@JAMEPAIN — Winline MVP of the second game, great performance from our captain 😎 pic.twitter.com/LGhHRDi89x

— Virtus.pro (@virtuspro) June 9, 2023

Group B results

In group B, FORZE encountered some resistance from ECSTATIC and then 9z, but both teams failed to bring them down.

In the first match, ECSTATIC had a 10-5 lead after the first half on Overpass. But unfortunately for them, the second half was a complete disappointment: 2-11. For FORZE, every single player had a good contribution. Meanwhile, ECSTATIC only had two players whose K-D scores were decent.

In the second match, FORZE got hard-carried by Aleksandr “shalfey” Marenov, whose score for the match was 27-14. The rest of his team didn’t do much because they didn’t have to. The final score was 16-11. With this victory, FORZE won the group and will compete against ENCE in the playoffs, which is less than ideal.

There’s a high chance that the Finnish players have already adapted to the air of the competition and will absolutely dismantle FORZE in the semifinals. Although, to be fair, the winners of IEM Dallas did lose against FORZE two times this year. Will this be their third failure or will they finally get a bit of revenge?

The runner-up in group B was 9z Team, who had to beat paiN Gaming (16-7) and ECSTATIC (2-1) to advance to the playoffs. Their first opponent will be Virtus.pro, who are considerably stronger than them.

Header: ESL