Virtus.pro win ESL Challenger Katowice 2023

After three days of competition, Virtus.pro won ESL Challenger Katowice 2023 and qualified for ESL Pro League Season 18.

For some, this result was predictable. After all, VP’s roster won the IEM Rio Major last year and is full of highly skilled players. But because of the failures they registered in the first five months of 2023, many doubted them.

ESL Challenger Katowice featured excellent teams like ENCE and FORZE Esports, who had beaten VP before. So there were a lot of reasons to be skeptical. But, when it mattered most, the CIS team played its A-game and won.

Champions always come back! We take the victory in this tournament, $50,000 and a slot for @ESLCS Pro League Season 18 🔥🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/QGJMJL1uvp

— Virtus.pro (@virtuspro) June 11, 2023

Virtus.pro’s run

VP started the tournament in group A and were faced with an easy opponent: Party Astronauts. The score, however, was very close 13-16 on Inferno. The CIS team was just a bit stronger than the American one and got carried by Evgenii “FL1T” Lebedev. Dzhami “Jame” Ali, who is usually an excellent AWPer, had a terrible performance: 11-13.

Virtus.pro went on to play an even harder match against ENCE. But once again, they won. The score was 17-19 on Mirage and this time, both FL1T and Jame had excellent scores. The best player on the server was Jame, with a rating 2.0 of 1.41.

Thanks to this second victory, Virtus.pro qualified for the playoffs and had to play against the 2^nd place team from group B, 9z Team. This was a very easy match in which they lost just 11 rounds in total.

The scores were 16-7 on Ancient and 16-4 on Inferno. The entire VP roster had ridiculously high ratings. Their weakest player, Alexey “Quikert” Golubev, had a K-D score of 28-22.

In the Grand Final, VP met the team they had already defeated in the group stage: ENCE. And the battle was very tense. The first map was one-sided: 16-4 for VP. The second and third maps, however, finished with thriller scores: 14-16 and 16-14. As you might imagine, the audience was continuously going from joy to despair.

The only reason why VP won was the godlike performance of Jame, who finished the match with a K-D score of 61-33. Of course, the fact that he’s the team’s AWPer helps a lot with the low deaths score, but it’s still impressive that he managed to get so many frags.

Header: Virtus.pro