Day 3 of the ESL Pro League Season 16 playoffs was a day of disappointment for many FaZe Clan fans. The CS: GO Major winners, FaZe Clan, were en route to win the Intel Grand Slam, but their attempts fell short against a strong performance by Cloud9. In the other match of the day, Team Liquid edge closer to the Grand Finals with a 2-0 victory over MOUZ.
The first map of Inferno saw FaZe Clan win by a narrow margin after some close clutches and individual performances.
The map was extremely close till the 25th round before FaZe Clan kept attacking the B bombsite. They explored Cloud9’s weakness on the Inferno B bombsite to win four consecutive rounds and secure their map lead.
The next two maps, however, were quite a different story with Sergey “Ax1Le” Rykhtorov stepping up for cloud9 on multiple occasions. The 20-year-old former Gambit player finished Ancient and Mirage with 27 kills apiece, leading Cloud9 to comeback in the series.
With this victory, Cloud9 now advance to the semifinals where they will face off against Team Liquid. Liquid’s NAF has already thrown the gauntlet and the Liquid players are very confident of their ability against Cloud9
We believe a system is the right way to play versus them, so any time we have to face Cloud9 I think a lot of us are very confident and just excited and eager to get into the game versus them.
NAF in an HLTV interview
FaZe Clan were unable to secure their Intel Grand Slam at EPL 16. They will have five more opportunities to secure the million dollar prize, with the next one being at IEM Rio Major in November.
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Team Liquid advance to semifinals after 2-0 Mouz
Meanwhile, in the other quarterfinal, Team Liquid also advanced to the semifinals after a dominant 2-0 victory over MOUZ.
An 11-4 lead on Inferno gave Team Liquid the start it needed to the series. Despite a small comeback by Mouz, it was easy going for Team Liquid who closed out the map at 16-10. Ancient was much more competitive, but Team Liquid still managed a 9-6 lead in the first half.
Team Liquid closed out Ancient with a 16-11 score. With 23 and 21 kills respectively, oSee and Elige were dominant in Liquid’s attack, getting entry frags and advantageous trades with alarming consistency..
With these losses MOUZ and FaZe Clan are out of the tournament in 5-8th place with $37,500 each.
Stay tuned to esports.gg for the latest CS: GO news and updates.
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