IEM Rio Major: Legends Stage Preview

IEM Rio Major is about to enter the Legends Stage. This is the second phase of the tournament and the greatest teams in the world will finally start competing.

Thanks to their Legend Status, they did not have to take part in the Challengers Stage, but now they will be required to prove themselves by obtaining three victories before suffering three defeats.

Only the top eight teams of the 16 remaining ones will qualify for the Champions Stage. Ahead of the tournament, the favorites were supposed to be Natus Vincere, FaZe Clan, and Team Vitality. But now that we’ve seen the Challengers Stage, it’s hard to regard Vitality as one of the top competitors.

The Legends Stage details

The Legends Stage of IEM Rio Major is scheduled to take place between November 5-8. The 16 participants will compete using the Swiss System format. All matches are best-of-one, except for the qualification and elimination ones, which are best-of-three.

The first round of matches already features some really tough battles. The best of them are listed below:

• Team Liquid vs. MOUZ
• FaZe Clan vs. Cloud9
• Natus Vincere vs. Team Vitality
• Heroic vs. Outsiders
• Ninjas in Pyjamas vs. Fnatic

Five of the eight matches that are about to take place on day one of the Legends Stage are worth watching. The favorites are Liquid, FaZe, Na’Vi, Heroic, and NiP. Who will actually win, remains to be seen.

The most important match of day one

The most exciting match of the five, if you only have time for one, is Na’Vi vs. Vitality. We could also call this match Aleksandr “s1mple” Kostyliev vs. Mathieu “ZywOo” Herbaut. These two players are by far the best in the world, and probably the main reason why their respective teams are ranked in the top three right now.

So far at IEM Rio Major, Vitality played five matches and ZywOo was the best player in four of them. He is hard-carrying his team right now and there seems to be no limit to what he can achieve. With the AWP he’s deadly. With a rifle he’s just as strong as he was at ESL Pro League Season 16. And sometimes he wins rounds with a mere pistol.

On the other side, s1mple is an absolute beast. He’s had a slower year because of the conflict that his country is involved in. But he clearly has a champion mentality and has probably been training hard for the Major.

A big advantage of s1mple over ZywOo is that he has an entire team to support him. Meanwhile, the French player is often struggling on his own.

Header: ESL