Team Vitality Wins IEM Winter After A Flawless Grand Final

IEM Winter was the penultimate CS:GO event of the year. The tournament offered the likes of G2 Esports, NiP, and Team Vitality a unique chance to win an important trophy in the absence of Natus Vincere. All of these teams had had a somewhat disappointing season in which they hadn’t won a single S-tier competition. In the end, the winner of the 3 was Vitality, largely thanks to an amazing performance by ZywOo. The team will receive $100,000 for its triumph.

Vitality’s Run at IEM Winter

IEM Winter had 16 participants. During the Group Stage, the teams got divided into 2 groups of 8. Vitality was placed in Group A, arguably the harder of the 2. But despite the challenges, the French squad finished 2^nd after defeating MOUZ and NiP. In the Upper Bracket Round 3, G2 Esports proved to be a bit too strong for them to handle.

In the Playoffs, Vitality had a really tough path to the Grand Final. Its first opponent was Gambit Esports. This shouldn’t have happened, but Gambit messed up in Group B and only finished 3^rd. As you might expect, the match needed 3 maps to conclude and the 3^rd of them also needed overtime. Vitality won, but only by the smallest of margins: 19 – 17.

The second match of the Playoffs was also tough for shox and his teammates, who had to face another CIS giant: Virtus.pro. The battle was won after just 2 maps, but in both cases the score was very close: 16 – 13 on Mirage and 16 – 13 on Vertigo.

Fortunately for Vitality, the other Semifinal ended with a huge upset. NiP was playing with a stand-in and the replaced player was device! Under these conditions, NiP’s chances looked very slim against G2 Esports. The first half of the first map seemed to confirm this: 10 – 5 in favor of G2. But then something happened and NiP ended up winning this map. On the second map, G2 managed to equalize (16 – 10). But then came the third map and the two teams went head to head from start to finish. NiP eventually won with a score of 16 – 14.

Grand Final

The success of the Swedish organization gave Vitality an easy Grand Final. The two teams had already met in the Group Stage of IEM Winter and ZywOo’s team won with ease: 16 – 6 and 16 – 9.  The Grand Final was only slightly different. NiP got better scores on each map, but still lost without winning a single one of them: 16 – 10 on Inferno, 16 – 10 on Dust II, and 16 – 13 on Nuke.

The MVP of the match and possibly the tournament was ZywOo. His rating 2.0 was 1.40 and his K-D score was +28. His teammate, shox, was not that far behind: 1.34 and +24. Meanwhile, on NiP’s side, everyone had a negative score and a rating 2.0 < 1.

 

Photo credit: IEM|Helena-Kristiansson