IEM Katowice 2023: NaVi and Team Liquid advance to semifinals

The quarterfinals of IEM Katowice are now history, and we have witnessed two great games in which the four teams gave them all to win. But, unfortunately, only two of them came out victorious, and now they will play for their lives against Heroic and G2 Esports, who were comfortably waiting in the semifinals.

An expected result and a surprise, that’s what these quarterfinals of IEM Katowice 2023 left us. With NaVi crushing Outsiders, Team Vitality squandered an extraordinary advantage in their first map against Team Liquid and ended up being eliminated in three maps.

Without further ado, let’s look at what happened in the quarterfinals of IEM Katowice 2023.

NaVi vs. Outsiders

Oleksandr “s1mple” Kostyljev put on the number 10 jersey for NaVi and led the Ukrainian team to a solid victory over Dzhami “Jame” Ali and Outsiders.

It all started on Overpass, the map Outsiders picked, where he ended all aspirations of the Russian team. In the first half, we saw a spectacular duel between s1mple and Jame; both charged their teams, and we witnessed a tight 9-6 with NaVi on the CT side. This equality continued in the second half of the map. Finally, Denis “electroNic” Sharipov woke up to shatter the Outsider’s defense and lead the team to victory 16-13.

In this first map, s1mple finished with a K-D of 23-14, an ADR of 84.9, and a rating of 1.32.

The second map, Inferno, selected by NaVi, started to become extremely balanced again. But this time, Jame’s opponent would be electroNic, which was responsible for destroying each of the defensive approaches proposed by the Russian team to lead NaVi to victory with a score of 16-12.

Team Liquid vs. Team Vitality

There is no doubt that the second semifinal was spectacular by any standards. Team Vitality started with a spectacular level of play, overwhelming and avoiding each of Team Liquid’s attacks on the CT side. All this to the point that at one point in the match, Vitality was leading 11-0. However, Team Liquid was able to go two rounds to avoid the 15-0 deficit.

The turnaround was phenomenal for Team Liquid and terrible for Team Vitality. The North American outfit, led by Jonathan “EliGE” Jablonowski and the AWP of Josh “oSee” Ohm, stopped every single approach by the French in this half. Unfortunately, what looked like a comfortable win for Vitality, turned into a nightmare that ended 19-17 in favor of Liquid in Overtime.

The second map, Nuke, was completely French. From the start of the map, Team Vitality felt like a fish in water, and thanks to this and a spectacular Mathieu “ZywOo” Herbaut, they took a comfortable victory with a score of 16-7. In Nuke, Team Liquid was not even the shadow of that team that came back spectacularly, Overpass.

Finally, everything was decided in Mirage, where we had a battle of titans throughout the match. Still, the balance was tipped in favor of Team Liquid, with a spectacular Keith “NAF” Markovic, who finished with an ADR of 91.2 and a rating of 1.29.

Semifinals

With these two results we have just seen, we will have a heart-stopping semifinal to be played today, February 11:

• Heroic vs. NaVi
• G2 Esports vs. Team Vitality

Header: ESL