ESL Pro League S16 Group B results & insights

The matches in the second group of ESL Pro League Season 16 are finally over and the results are almost identical to what the statistics indicated ahead of the battle.

G2 Esports surprised everyone with a stellar performance and not even FaZe Clan were able to stand up to them. Apart from that, the top teams qualified with ease, while the battle for third place was won by Outsiders (the former Virtus.pro roster).

Complete results

The complete results of group B look like this:

• G2 Esports: 5 W – 0 L | +73
• FaZe Clan: 4 W – 1 L | +39
• Outsiders: 3 W – 2 L | +27
• BIG: 2 W – 3 L | +3
• MIBR: 1 W – 4 L | -62
• FTW Esports: 0 W – 5 L | -80

G2 Esports will advance to the Quarterfinals while FaZe Clan and Outsiders will go to the Round of 12. Unfortunately for BIG, their defeat against Outsiders was enough to ruin their chances. They clearly had no hope against G2 and FaZe, so a single match decided their fate in this group. And they lost it.

The lessons we learned

Before the start of ESL Pro League Season 16, FaZe Clan and Natus Vincere looked much stronger than everyone else. Now we know that at least two other teams, Vitality and G2 Esports, are currently just as strong or even stronger.

In G2’s case, it seems that Ilya “m0NESY” Osipov has become accustomed to the highest professional level and it’s now just a matter of time until he starts playing the way Aleksandr “s1mple” Kostyliev did at his age.

In fact, some claim that m0NESY might prove to be even stronger, because he has more people to learn from and also because G2’s roster is much better than that of Na’Vi’s 2017.

Of course, we still need to wait and see how everyone will do in the playoffs of this tournament, the qualifiers for IEM Rio Major, and then at the Major itself. Only after the end of the Rio Major will we know for sure what the new pecking order is.

It might turn out that Na’Vi and FaZe are still unbeatable. But we could also discover that other teams have decyphered their playstyle and have gotten better as a result.

In group B of ESL Pro League Season 16, FaZe looked strong overall but not as strong as they did at the last few $1 million tournaments, such as PGL Major Antwerp and IEM Cologne. Finn “karrigan” Andersen’s team lost a few maps even against much weaker opponents like MIBR. So they’re far from being unbeatable.

Header: ESL