IEM Katowice 2019 Round 3: new legends, old names

The opening day of the New Legends Stage is now behind us, the pairings for the Swiss-system elimination and advancement stage are now set, and some hype action is coming for us today.

After the initial round, the four teams that managed to have a perfect run were Astralis, Renegades, Liquid and Natus Vincere. On the opposite side of the bracket we have NRG, ENCE, CompLexity and BIG as the teams that managed to get to consecutive losses. Everybody else played one and one and managed to stay in the no-contest area of the bracket.

So with the biggest winners and losers of Day 1 known, ESL announced the matchups for the next stage (see below), and it is our duty to look at the most notable moments, the story so far and all the action packed matchups we are served.

2-0 Pool:

Astralis vs. Renegades

Team Liquid vs. Natus Vincere

1-1 Pool:

FaZe Clan vs. AVANGAR

MIBR vs. G2

Ninjas in Pyjamas vs. HellRaisers

Vitality vs. Cloud9

0-2 Pool:

NRG vs. compLexity

ENCE vs. BIG

No surprise with the upper part of the standings being headlined by tournament favorites Astralis. They managed to dominate Complexity (16:6) and Cloud9 (16:0) and sailed smoothly ahead of the pack on Day 1. Their opponent Renegades had a much tougher day one. They managed to overpower Faze (16:13) and ENCE (16:14) in very tight and nail-biting matchups on their way get to the 2-0 pool. Now both teams are set to meet and decide who gets to go to the top of the pack and who will drop down to the “safe-space” of the bracket.

The second matchup at the top of the standings features two fan favorites. Team Liquid and NaVi were not as domineering on day one as they would have liked. NaVi had to struggle in overtime versus Vitality (25:22) and Liquid had to battle through two back and forth matchups agaisnt NiP (16:13) and AVANGAR (16:12). We have already covered the lapses in NaVi’s game, and how much they struggled versus the likes of AVANGAR at the Ice Challenge. Is Liquid going the exploit the same lapses in judgment versus NaVi that AVANGAR did or have NaVi learned from their mistakes in the past two weeks?

At the opposite side of the pool, we have the teams that got beat in their first two matchups and now must compete for their tournament lives.

NRG and ENCE both came out of the Challenger Stage at IEM Katowice and had tons of practice, whilst both of their opponents Complexity/BIG got seeded directly into the event. Now all four teams are facing elimination. Will the teams coming out of the Challenger stage utilize all the last minute practice and get ahead, or will the higher seeded teams with a direct invite strike true and move forward? What we know for certain is that neither of this teams had a good start of the Legends Stage and the ones that get to bounce back and mentally reset before today’s matches should have the upper hand.

The matches at the middle of the standings are all Bo1. And no matter how much analysis we pour into them a best of one can be a coin toss, especially when all teams are such high caliber, nevertheless if you enjoy a messy CS:GO brawl while you watch the streams look no further then FaZe vs AVANGAR, which is also the first match of the day.

Head out to Twitch.tv/ESL_CSGO for all of today’s action.