Gambit move past Acend into EMEA Playoffs final

Gambit Esports Gambit Esports Inactive Redgar Igor Vlasov Chronicle Timofey Khromov d3ffo Nikita Sudakov sheydos Bogdan Naumov nAts Ayaz Akhmetshin sent Acend Acend Inactive ALIVE Gilad Hakim musashi Alessio Xhaferi pyrolll Artur Minin cullumx Nikolaj Cullum Andersen chiwa Egor Stepanyuk packing in the Stage 3: EMEA Challengers Playoffs, outlasting them 3-1 in the lower bracket final.

Acend walk away from the EMEA Challengers Playoffs with the third seed for Stage 3: Masters Berlin.

Gambit finished off their lower bracket run today after losing to Acend in the upper bracket semifinals on August 16. They'll now have to win one more game to consolidate their second EMEA Challengers Playoffs run.

Gambit picked Ascent, their most successful map, to start off. The initial rounds left the game in a 3-3 tie. An Operator 3K from d3ffo enabled the team to take the half advantage. Out of Acend's four attacking rounds, two were won by clutches from Patryk "starxo" Kopczynski and Mehmet "cNed" Yağız İpek respectively, the latter scoring an ace in the process.

Gambit looked all but ready as the teams switched sides, but Acend wouldn't go down that easily. Even on their weakest map, the team started to mount a comeback. They won the pistol and the following round, but dropped three following that. Gambit only managed one round after that, placing the game in overtime.

Both squads went back and forth for what felt like an eternity, with neither being able to win Attacking rounds. "It was hard because I was trying to do the same things we do in regulation and it didn't work," Igor "Redgar" Vlasov explained. Acend was extremely close to winning an Attacking round but the IGL himself defused the Spike with 0.2 seconds left. Gambit won the map in the following round, 18-16.

Acend couldn't do much on Bind. Despite being their pick, Gambit was stellar on the map, furthered by Bogdan "sheydos" Naumov's godly B site hold, where he aced by himself, as well as a 4K hold on A site from Nikita "d3ffo" Sudakov in the following round. In just over 30 minutes, Gambit put up a 13-4 result on the board and were a map away from the grand final.

One wonders how Gambit could go from an 18-6 on their pick to a 13-4 on their opponents' pick. "I think [it was close because] it's the first map," Redgar said. The team also seems to have a new pre-game ritual. "We had to warmup a little, because we didn't practice before our game. We're trying to practice like we're already in Berlin - where we can't practice before officials. It was really hard for us to start."

Redgar's men then won the pistol on Breeze. But that looked like it was it. The next eleven rounds were straight Acend. The same sheydos who scored 300 ACS on Bind only managed to take down one enemy before switching sides. Gambit didn't look themselves. "We forgot how to play on this map. We have a couple of unusual tactics that we didn't use. The only thing on our minds was 'peek and kill', not to use abilities and team play," recalled Redgar.

Gambit refused to go down that easily and narrowed the scoreline down, even prompting a timeout from Acend after their first five rounds. Gambit easily dominated the second half with six straight rounds, but the advantage their opponents had accrued while attacking themselves was insurmountable, finally placing Acend on the board with a 13-9 win.

Haven was up next. It was Acend's second pick, and a map Gambit apparently hate. VLR.gg has only tracked nine Haven maps from Gambit's part, and they've only played it once since First Strike. There was no telling what was coming.

Even with such unpredictability from the Russian side being inevitable, no one could have expected Timofey "Chronicle" Khromov on a Smoker and Redgar on the Reyna. "We talked after Breeze and it was like 'guys, we don't play Haven. We don't pay attention to this map. So what do you want to play?'" He went on to say every player picked their own Agent except Chronicle.

"'Eh, I don't really want to play Sova. You can choose for me,'" Redgar quoted Chronicle. "I told him to play Omen but he said 'no, I want to play Brimstone.' I said 'okay, go play it!'" The Russian IGL is used to playing Omen, but he just wanted to have some fun on Haven and decided to go with Reyna. "I just want to kill someone!"

Somehow, it led to an absolute highlight reel of a match. Three 4K's, 12 3K's and five clutch plays.

The plays of the match overshadowed the score itself, which was kept largely in Gambit's control and led to their 13-7 win, despite the crazy rounds from both sides. It's hard to highlight a single play.

First, it was d3ffo's 1v2 clutch on B which he won with a noscope. Then, sheydos single-handedly gave his team the half victory with a beastly 1v4 from A site Heaven. Shortly after, cNed closed out the half with a 1v4 hold of C that shouldn't have happened. No one, not even the casters, knew what was happening. "What is this game?! What is this game?!" were the few words Mitch "MitchMan" McBride could muster.

zeek and BONECOLD were the only ones without a highlight play.

When the dust settled, Gambit was the only team left standing. Somehow, amidst all of that chaos, they managed to come out on top and secure today's win. "We had a pretty bad game on Breeze, we didn't show our own play style," Redgar said.

Their final seeding match is tomorrow - they'll either walk away with the first or second seed. It's all down to one Bo5 against Papara SuperMassive Papara SuperMassive Europe Rank #13 skylen Asil Yalçın ip0TT Yiğit Karadeniz VenTT Emre Bozkurt Celasun Emir Celasun umu7 Umut Pekdoğan .

"I think we'll try to fix our problems. Try to do some things in practice because we won't have officials for about two or three weeks. Right now, we have to get as much experience as we can," Redgar said. "I just want to have fun versus my Turkish kankas."

Gambit and SuperMassive Blaze play the EMEA Challengers Playoffs grand final tomorrow, August 22, starting at 3 p.m. CEST.