Upsets abound in Rotterdam qualifier
With ESL Challenger at DreamHack Rotterdam just one month away, the open qualifiers waters were infested with sharks hunting for a spot in the closed qualifier. Evil Geniuses were present in the competition with their EG.CD roster, as well as Strife, BHOP, timbermen, Mythic, and recent RMR-bound teams, oNe and Infinity.
Round one of the qualifier went relatively as expected. All top-10 seeded teams made it onto the round-of-16 except for Detonate, who fell short against Esoteric. The round-of-16 came with Mythic and the South Americans of the moment, Infinity, losing their games. Erik "fl0m" Flom's team lost against Heroic (the American ones, not the Danish ones) while Infinity got eliminated by Vendetta.
Vendetta continued to surprise everyone as in their quarter-final match they won against #1 seed EG.CD. The underdog team was led to a 16-12 victory on nuke by the Pakistani duo of Khizar "Momo" Rehman and Saad "Pluto" Siraj. The Evil Geniuses squad relied on the young duo of Jerric "wiz" Jiang and Connor "chop" Sullivan, as well as the veteran Peter "stanislaw" Jarguz to try and get the win, but it wasn't enough.
On the other side of the bracket, oNe eliminated BHOP in a very close 16-14 affair with the help of their Guatemalan gem, Mario "malbsMd" Samayoa. The #7 team in North America, Strife, lost against the former Northern Forces squad of Phantom Troupe after three overtimes. Strife played without longstanding player Keller "SLIGHT" Nilan, instead, they fielded Calvin "becker" Becker, the team's coach.
The semi-finals are set with Vendetta facing timbermen and oNe facing Phantom Troupe. Both games will be starting at 06:00PM today.
Only one of these teams will be advancing to the closed qualifier tonight, with the remaining still having a shot during the second open qualifier, starting on September 14th. For the closed qualifier, the winners of the open qualifiers will be joined by a pair of invited rosters.
ESL Challenger at DreamHack Rotterdam will start on October 14th and will end on October 16th, and has a prize pool of $100,000, with the winner getting $50,000 plus a spot at ESL Pro League Season 17 Conference.
