Tempo Storm have won the North American online qualifier for IEM Katowice by defeating Cloud9 2-0 (16-14 on de_mirage and 19-17 on de_cache).

The tenth season of the Intel Extreme Masters will take place from March 4-6 in the Spodek Arena and most notably feature a $250,000, 12-team CS:GO tournament.

Eight teams were invited due to their top eight placings in the last Major of Cluj-Napoca whereas four have advanced via regional qualifiers for Europe, Asia, and North America (with E-frag, mousesports, and TheMongolz having done so already in their respective regions).



boltz and Tempo Storm took down all three NA titans to qualify: Liquid, CLG, Cloud9

Over 100 teams took part in the single elimination bracket for the North American IEM Katowice qualifier, with teams such as Winterfox, NRG, and SPLYCE falling by the wayside early on.

The quarter-finals switched into best-of-three games, with OpTiC taking out Enemy at this stage and perhaps most notably the Brazilians of Tempo Storm taking down Liquid 2-1 in a heavily anticipated game.

Tempo Storm would not stop there however as they took down CLG 2-0 in the semifinals and advanced into the grand final against Cloud9.

Although Ryan "⁠freakazoid⁠" Abadir & co. managed to finish the first halves of both series maps with commanding CT-side scorelines (11-4 on de_mirage and 10-5 on de_cache), the similar storylines seen at the GEC Game Show finals came into play as a lack of T-side execution and strategy was the North American team's downfall.

Tempo Storm for their part continued upon a growing reputation for dependable teamwork and drilled retakes and site takes to power forward and win both maps, 16-14 on de_mirage and 19-17 on de_cache, and thereby qualify for Group B of IEM Katowice.

IEM Katowice 2016 NA Qualifier Best of 3 Tempo Storm Matchpage 2 0 Cloud9 16 Mirage 14 19 Cache 17

The group draw for IEM Katowice is:

Group A Group B fnatic fnatic EnVyUs EnVyUs Na`Vi Na`Vi Astralis Astralis Luminosity Luminosity Virtus.pro Virtus.pro NiP NiP FaZe FaZe mousesports mousesports E-frag E-frag TheMongolz TheMongolz Tempo Storm Tempo Storm

stich writes for HLTV.org and can be found on Twitter