Today, on February 12, the Polish city of Katowice hosted the final of one of the largest annual Counter Strike: Global Offensive tournaments — IEM Katowice 2023. The teams of the German club G2 Esports and the Norwegian organization Heroic competed for the championship cup and serious prize money. Team G2 won with a score of 3:1 on maps.
Six teams got to the playoff stage of the tournament: Russian Outsiders (organization Virtus.pro), Ukrainian NAVI, French Team Vitality, American Team Liquid and the already mentioned Heroic and G2. The Outsiders team was eliminated at the quarter-final stage, and NAVI lost in the semi-finals just to Heroic, who went straight from the group stage to the semi-finals. G2 also immediately found themselves in the semi-finals, and in order to reach the finals, it was necessary to defeat Team Liquid.
The first map was Nuke, which was chosen by G2 and won with a score of 16:12. The next map was Mirage, which was chosen by Heroic and lost with a score of 16:13. On the third map, Inferno, chosen by G2, Heroic was ahead with a score of 16:11. Map Ancient (Heroic’s choice) ended 16:7 in favor of G2. Things never came to the decisive Vertigo. Let’s add here that Heroic interrupted G2’s unbeaten streak of 21 maps within the framework of this meeting. But it was not possible to interrupt the series of matches without defeats — for G2 it was the 12th victory in a row.
The winner of IEM Katowice 2023 took home the top prize of $400,000. The team that took second place received $180,000. For G2, this was the third final of the tournament in Katowice in history, but the first victory: the team lost to NAVI in 2020, and FaZe Clan in 2022. In turn, Heroic had not reached the finals of this tournament before.
The G2 CS: GO team played today: Russian Ilya «m0NESY» Osipov, Bosnians Nikola «NiKo» Kovach (Nikola Kovač) and Nemanja «huNter-» Kovach (Nemanja Kovač), Australian Justin «jks» Savage and team captain Dane Rasmus «HooXi» Nielsen (Rasmus Nielsen).
Justin «jks» Savage was named Man of the Match, who made a huge contribution to the victory of his team, having committed 80 kills with 62 deaths, scoring a rating of 1.20 (Rating 2.0 on HLTV) and 80 ADR. Nemanja «huNter-» Kovac was named the best player of the entire tournament with a rating of 1.21.
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