ESL Pro League S16 Group A kicks off today

ESL Pro League Season 16 is about to start and the matches will take place sequentially, in the order of groups. This means that group A will be played first and no match from other groups will overlap with its own.

The teams in this group are some of the best in the world, so it will be fascinating to see them clash. The results may give us an idea of what will happen in the European RMRs for IEM Rio Major.

Group A participants

These are the six teams that will play in group A of ESL Pro League S16:

• Natus Vincere
• Ninjas in Pyjamas
• Team Vitality
• Fnatic
• Team Spirit
• Endpoint

The competitive format is quite harsh and only 50% of the teams will advance to the playoffs.

Predictions

The big favorites in this group are Na’Vi, NiP, and Vitality. The biggest battle will take place between Na’Vi and Vitality. The two teams have already played one match this month and the Ukrainians won: 16-10 on Inferno and 16-13 on Mirage.

However, the battle was not exactly easy and Vitality lost in part because Emil “Magisk” Reif had a bad match. This may not be the case at EPL S16.

NiP’s odds against Na’Vi are not very good, but they’re not null either. In recent weeks, the Swedish team had a couple of good results against Astralis and Heroic. And while these teams are not at Na’Vi’s level, the victories were still significant.

In their most recent battle, which took place at IEM Cologne back in July, Na’Vi obliterated NiP: 16-3 on Overpass and 16-7 on Nuke.

Against other teams, Na’Vi should have almost free matches. Since the match format is best-of-three, winning against them is extremely hard and it’s unlikely that anyone apart from Vitality and NiP will succeed.

Even these two teams have remote chances. But the other three participants would probably lose 9/10 matches against Aleksandr “s1mple” Kostyliev’s crew.

The battle for second place is not that important, but it will probably be won by Vitality. As long as Mathieu “ZywOo” Herbaut plays his usual game and the rest of the roster has an average match, victory should be theirs.

The other three teams in the group are too far behind in terms of skill to pose a real threat. Fnatic seem to have a chance if they play as well as they did in the open qualifiers for IEM Rio Major. But the odds are still extremely low.

Header: ESL