ESL One Los Angeles Online had reached its end point for
some regions but for Europe and CIS, today would be the day that their group
stage begun, with Group A seeing all eight teams playing in their first series.
Group A at ESL One LA Online featured some extremely big
names such as OG, Team Nigma and Virtus.pro, to name but a few, and today we
witnessed all of them kick off their tournament. With four best-of-three
series, we were definitely not starved for Dota 2 action at all, with teams
showing their strengths in the current meta.
Vikin.gg and Gambit Esports were the first two teams to
clash in Group A and while we had not seen much from Vikin.gg for some time,
they were definitely the better of the two squads. The series was over in only
two games, which both lasted around 23-minutes and saw Vikin.gg absolutely
destroy Gambit. Following this would be the biggest series of the day, one
pitting the best against the best – with OG going up against Nigma.
Although OG’s team was quite different from the two-time TI
winning squad, nothing much had changed in their playstyle, even with Neta ‘33’
Shapira standing in for them. The team played extremely fast and even when Nigma
had small glimmers of hope, OG shut them down with ease as their 2-0 victory
came in less than a combined game length of 60-minutes.
After the clash of EU’s top teams, it was time for a CIS battle
between Virtus.pro and HellRaisers – both of whom were looking to stamp
themselves as one of the best in the region. HR definitely looked the better of
the two teams going into the first game of the series, securing a solid victory
– but VP struck back in the next to tie things up at 1-1 and take us to our
first full three-game series of the EU/CIS region. The final game was a 22-minute
stomping from VP which secured them the series and led onto the final series of
Group A for the day, Cyber Legacy versus B8.
While Danil ‘Dendi’ Ishutin’s squad were able to pull out an
amazing 19-minute victory in the first game of their series, CL were clearly
just warming up. Over the next two games in the series they gave B8 absolutely
no chance to get off the mark, dominating them and taking the series 2-1.
That ends day one of group stages at ESL One Los Angeles Online
with OG, VP, Cyber Legacy and Vikin.gg sitting atop the group, with Group B
kicking off their event tomorrow.
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