IEM Rio Major Legends Stage continues with surprising results

There is only one more round to be played at IEM Rio Major to determine the Champions Stage competitors. Five teams have already qualified for the last stage of the tournament and they are not the ones that the CS:GO community had expected to qualify.

The fourth round of the Legends Stage sent home three more teams and one of them was ranked in the top three at the start of the tournament. Unfortunately for Team Vitality and their fans, this was not their best Major performance.

Right now, the players of G2 Esports are probably thinking to themselves that they’re not that far behind after all.

Results

The fourth round of IEM Rio Major’s Legends Stage had only six matches. But all of them were best-of-three series.

Five of these matches ended with a clean score (2-0). The sixth was a bit tougher and required three maps to conclude. This was expected, given the formidable strength of both Heroic and Team Liquid. In the end, Heroic were the winners.

By far, the most shocking result of the six was the 2-0 victory obtained by ENCE over Vitality. It’s probably not how Mathieu “ZywOo” Herbaut imagined himself leaving the tournament, but it’s the cold reality that he will need to accept in the coming days.

This roster has great potential and the investment that was made in the players is probably huge. But so far, Vitality have only won a few trophies.

In another advancement match, Fnatic smashed BIG (2-0) and practically ended their tournament. Because in round 5, BIG will now have to play against Na’Vi and the odds of succeeding are almost null.

Natus Vincere had to play an elimination match against Bad News Eagles after going 1 W – 2 L in round 3. The match was extremely easy for Aleksandr “s1mple” Kostyliev and his crew. BNE only won 12 rounds in total. S1mple was by far the best player on the server, finishing with a K-D score of +24 and a rating 2.0 of 1.72.

In a rather surprising way, Outsiders defeated MOUZ and qualified for the Champions Stage. This defeat puts MOUZ in a delicate spot, because they’ll need to win against ENCE to advance. And ENCE, as we saw in round 4, are quite strong at the moment. It’s hard to be a weak team and beat the likes of Vitality.

Spirit eliminated Sprout. Everyone wanted Sprout to win because they have a lot of fascinating players. But in this match, they clearly showed their limitations. Sprout will likely need another couple of months to reach their full potential.

Header: ESL