BLAST Premier: Spring Showdown could have been won by half a dozen teams, all of whom have excellent rosters and vast experience in winning Counter-Strike tournaments. But the event ended up being won by one favorite and one underdog.
Team Spirit was on everyone’s mind when the competition began because of their impressive result from IEM Katowice, where nobody could stop them from winning their first S-tier trophy to date, largely thanks to the contribution of a 17-year-old who has become famous in the CS2 community in the last 12 months: Danil “donk” Kryshkovets.
Many regard his individual performance as the best performance ever by a player at a Counter-Strike event. With such a player on the team and with a $1 million tournament won just weeks before, Spirit were naturally regarded as the big favorite in the bottom half of the bracket at BLAST Premier: Spring Showdown. And they didn’t disappoint.
But the top half of the bracket was won by SAW, who encountered three well-established teams and proved each time that they deserved to compete in BLAST Premier: Spring Final.
Spirit’s Triumph
Spirit played their first match of the tournament against Elevate and won 2 – 0. In their second match, against BIG, they obtained an identical result but had to fight a little harder for it. Both times, donk was the best player on the server.
In the final match against Metizport, Spirit faced an unusually tough opponent. This team was not even in the top 40 and yet they had defeated Team Falcons and Monte. Their prowess was immediately obvious and they ended up winning the first map 13 – 8 after successfully shutting down donk. But on the second and third maps, he was unstoppable.
The scores on these maps speak for themselves: 4 – 13 and 8 – 13. Donk was both times the player with the highest number of frags on the server.
SAW’s Triumph
SAW started BLAST Premier: Spring Showdown with a promising victory against Team Liquid. They were close to winning the match after just two maps, but Liquid bested them in overtime on Inferno. The scores were 10 – 13 on Nuke, 16 – 14 on Inferno, and 4 – 13 on Ancient.
In the second and third matches, SAW encountered Cloud9 and OG. Both of these teams could have ended their run, but the Portuguese team won each time 2 – 0, proving that their performance in the first European RMR for PGL Major Copenhagen, where they finished in the top eight, was not a fluke.
Header image credit: BLAST
