Imperial and Vitality prove themselves at BLAST Premier: Spring Final

BLAST Premier: Spring Final has been full of surprises. In the group stage, Cloud9 and Astralis were eliminated despite not being the weakest teams in their respective groups.

The playoffs started with two matches. One of them was highly anticipated because it represented an opportunity for FaZe Clan to get revenge for what happened at IEM Rio 2023 and ESL Pro League S17, where Team Vitality defeated them.

The other match was far less interesting because neither Imperial Esports nor Complexity are top teams at the moment. But the fight between them still proved to be fun to watch.

FaZe Clan vs. Team Vitality

This match started with a very difficult map for both teams: Anubis. The score after the first half was 8-7. The second half was almost identical, which sent the map into overtime. Vitality ended up winning with a score of 19-17.

This should not have happened given the fact that apart from Mathieu “ZywOo” Herbaut, the entire Vitality roster did a mediocre job. Meanwhile, FaZe had two players who surpassed ZywOo and finished with 37 kills. Their rating 2.0 was above 1.50. But FaZe still lost because they had two underperformers.

On the second map, Mirage, the battle was one-sided. It was obvious to everyone that FaZe had completely lost their morale after map 1. The score was 16-8 for Vitality. The best player of the French squad was Lotan “Spinx” Giladi. His K-D score was 21-13, which proved to be more than sufficient to carry his team to victory.

Imperial Esports vs. Complexity

 

༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ Take my energy #GoIMP ༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ pic.twitter.com/KJZt0y9p5U

— Imperial Sportsbet.io (@imperialesports) June 10, 2023

The first map of this match almost had an absolutely epic comeback. Imperial were leading after the first half with a score of 11-4. The final score was 16-14. The audience, or at least Imperial’s fans, felt huge relief when the Brazilian squad finally got their much-needed round wins.

The man who carried Imperial was Gabriel “FalleN” Toledo, who will retire at the end of this season from professional CS:GO. His K-D score on this map was 25-19. Overall, he finished the match with a score of 37-28. Imperial won 2-0 after a dominant performance on Overpass: 16-6.

The result of this match sent Imperial to the semifinals. This team has never played in the semifinals of an S-tier tournament until now.

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