The six playoffs teams of IEM Rio 2023 have been decided

The group stage of IEM Rio 2023 is over and only six of the 16 teams advanced to the playoffs. With a few exceptions, everyone that was expected to qualify made it through. But for many of the participants, the battles they had to win to get to this point were quite challenging.

The teams that got eliminated were partly expected to fail, either because they were inexperienced or because they had played poorly in the qualifiers for BLAST.tv Paris Major. The most important examples are 9INE and FaZe Clan.

Among the six playoffs participants there are two dark horses. These teams were not expected to play as well as they did it seems that their failure to qualify for the Major motivated them to do something great at IEM Rio. These teams are BIG and Cloud9. In C9’s case, the result is very impressive: first place in group B.

Group A results

In group A, Natus Vincere won without losing a single map. They came close to getting defeated against Ninjas in Pyjamas, on Ancient (13-16), and against BIG, on Mirage (20-22). But apart from these close results, Aleksandr “s1mple” Kostyliev and his crew have had a very easy tournament so far.

The second place in the group was taken by BIG, who managed somehow to defeat Heroic. The team led by Casper “cadiaN” Moller finished third after beating The MongolZ and NiP in the lower bracket.

Group B results

In group B of IEM Rio 2023, FURIA defeated both Fnatic and FaZe Clan, showing great determination in both matches. The upper bracket Final was rough and a bit unfortunate for the Brazilian side, who could have won in just two maps. But after having a 9-6 advantage on Inferno, they lost in overtime.

In the end, C9 won with a score of 2-1. Once again, their best player was Dmitry “sh1ro” Sokolov, who is on track to finish 2023 as a top 10 player in CS:GO.

Strangely enough, Team Vitality lost their first match in the upper bracket and FaZe Clan lost their second. This created a very sad but very hyped elimination match between the two teams in the lower bracket. Vitality won but only with great difficulty. On Anubis, the score was 16-19, while Overpass finished with a score of 9-16.

The defeat on the first map clearly broke FaZe Clan’s players, even though it was Vitality’s pick. The French team went on to beat OG in the lower bracket Final and finished in third place.

Header: ESL