MOUZ and BNE advance to the Legends Stage of IEM Rio Major

Even though it seemed unlikely ahead of the start of IEM Rio Major, MOUZ and Bad News Eagles proved to be the strongest teams of the Challengers Stage. Both of them successfully advanced to the Legends Stage with perfect records.

In MOUZ’s case, the strength of the team was known in advance. But nobody thought that they were better than Outsiders and Cloud9, FURIA, or Vitality.

MOUZ’s IEM Rio Challengers Stage results

MOUZ entered the tournament as a top 10 team in the global rankings. And they immediately impressed the Brazilian fans with their skills. In their first match, against Outsiders, David “frozen” Cernansky and Dorian “xertioN” Berman had a rating 2.0 of 1.82 and 1.77 respectively. So it’s no wonder that MOUZ won with ease: 16-6.

The second match was against Evil Geniuses. Once again, xertioN excelled and was the best player on the server. His teammates played really well too. Despite the fact that Mirage was EG’s strongest map, the North American team still lost decisively: 16-10.

The third match, against Fnatic, was MOUZ’s first real challenge. However, apart from losing the second map (9-16 on Inferno), MOUZ heavily dominated the match and won the other two maps with ease: 16-8 on Vertigo and 16-9 on Ancient. Frozen was the best player on the server. His K-D score was 54-36.

With this performance, MOUZ gave their fans real hopes for the Legends Stage. It will still be very hard for them to survive this stage, but they certainly have the potential to finish IEM Rio Major in the top eight.

Bad News Eagles’ Run

Bad News Eagles started the tournament with a one-sided match against 00NATION, one of the loved teams in Brazil. It must have felt bad for them to crush the Brazilians and give a lot of fans a bad time. But at the end of the day, victory is all that matters. The score was 16-3 and it seemed as though BNE were playing against an amateur team.

BNE’s second match was against BIG. Despite the German’s excellent scores and individual results, BNE won the match with a score of 16-11. What’s truly remarkable about this victory is that BNE started the second half with a score of 11-4 and went on to win 12 consecutive rounds.

In the third round, BNE encountered Team GamerLegion and the match was very easy: 16-9 on Ancient and 16-7 on Mirage. Usually, strong teams encounter other strong teams after two consecutive victories, but both BNE and GL proved to be dark horses.

 

Header: Stephanie Lindgren / ESL