ESL Pro League Season 3: Luminosity, G2 Advance to Finals
The semi-finals of ESL Pro League Season 3 saw four of the world’s top Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) teams go up against each other, with LG and G2 going on to the grand finals and two Swedish teams in the form of NiP and Fnatic eliminated from the tournament.
In the first semi-final match, MLG Columbus champions Luminosity Gaming (LG) went up against a resurgent Ninjas in Pyjamas (NiP) side on Overpass, Dust 2 and Cobblestone. While the first map simply showed a dominant LG on one of their home maps, NiP showed a dominant game in the seond map, even featuring an insane one-on-three pistol clutch by Richard “Xizt” Landström.
The third map turned out to be pretty close despite a 10-5 commanding lead by LG on their CT side on Cobblestone; however, in the 26th round, Gabriel “FalleN” Toledo and company sealed the deal by stopping NiP’s B-site smoke execute in order to become the first grand finalist of the ESL Pro League Season 3.
For the second semi-final match, French side G2 faced off against top Swedish side Fnatic, who were playing with a standin in the form of John “wenton” Eriksson, formerly of Team Preparation. The substitute player replaced star player Olof “olofmeister” Kajbjer, who is currently suffering from a wrist injury and is unable to play for Fnatic.
Inferno, Cache and Train were the maps for this matchup, with Fnatic mounting a huge comeback and getting the first map at 14-16 despite a dominant 13-2 CT side by the French team.
On Cache, the French won with a convincing scoreline of 16-8 despite a pistol ace by Dennis “dennis” Edman on the second half of the map.
It all came down to Train, with a good CT-side showing by G2 earning them a 9-6 lead, then translating it into a 14-8 scoreline on the Terrorist side of Cache before Fnatic showed some good holds on the defensive side of the map. In the end, the Frenchmen won the series 16-12, thus setting them up against the Brazilians in the grand finals of ESL Pro League.
The grand finals will be held in a best-of-five format at 12:00 midnight, Monday, PHT.
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