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Sprout and Fnatic win their groups at Elisa Masters Espoo

With just one exception, the group stage of Elisa Masters Espoo went exactly as the statistics indicated. Teams like... Radu M. | 17. November 2022

With just one exception, the group stage of Elisa Masters Espoo went exactly as the statistics indicated.

Teams like Fnatic and Sprout did well, while other competitors, such as HAVU Gaming and SAW, got crushed.

Group A

This group was supposed to have BIG, ENCE, and Sprout in the top three. And they all advanced to the playoffs. But few people would have predicted Sprout to win.

The best teams in this group won matches they should have lost and lost matches they should have won. Sprout’s only loss was against BIG (16-11). BIG’s losses were against GamerLegion and ENCE. ENCE’s loss was against Sprout.

Quite a few matches ended with tight scores or even in overtime. In Sprout’s case, three of the five battles ended like this. They nearly lost against HEET (16-14), ENCE (19-16), and GamerLegion (25-23).

In the end, Sprout’s group win was a result of their perseverance when everything looked grim. And, of course, of beating ENCE, the team that finished second with the same record of 4 W – 1 L.

The complete results in this group look like this:

  • Sprout: 4 W – 1 L
  • ENCE: 4 W – 1 L
  • BIG: 3 W – 2 L
  • HEET: 2 W – 3 L
  • GamerLegion: 2 W – 3 L
  • HAVU Gaming: 0 W – 5 L

Group B

In group B, Bad News Eagles were expected to repeat their good performance from IEM Rio Major and qualify. But despite winning their first match, they played just a little bit worse than their opponents in the next four and lost every single one of them.

The most dominant performance in this group belonged to Fnatic. The Swedes only lost one match, against Complexity, and obtained relatively easy victories against three of their opponents.

In the battle against SAW, Fnatic were behind after the first half but managed to send the map into overtime, where they won after two best-of-six series: 22-20.

Astralis showed decent skills but still lost two matches. On top of that, they finished with the worst round score in this group: -14. The teams that defeated them were Fnatic (16-7) and 500 (16-1). This second loss was absolutely brutal and unexpected.

Team 500 are almost completely unknown at this point and so we wonder: how did Astralis manage to lose to them so badly? It’s very hard to explain how a team of their caliber can go from great to abysmal so quickly.

The complete results in group B look like this:

  • Fnatic: 4 W – 1 L
  • 500: 4 W – 1 L
  • Astralis: 3 W – 2 L
  • Complexity: 2 W – 3 L
  • Bad News Eagles: 1 W – 4 L
  • SAW: 1 W – 4 L

Header: Elisa Esports