The early hours of last night saw the conclusion of the first round of elimination games for epic EIGHTEEN, and though it largely saw the seeded teams matched up against those who finished third and fourth in the groups, it still wasn’t without its excitement.
Due to the tie in group D between VATIC and Impulse Gaming White, VATIC advanced into the eliminations in the third place position. Unfortunately, this saw them up against another seeded team a round earlier in the tournament than they would have hoped for. Their opponents were to be the Perilous.FURY side, a roster littered with experience and skills to boot.
The tournament hallway filled with the shouts and heckles from each side, with the voices of VATIC at first bellowing loudest as they managed to take an early lead on the first map. However, their advantage was short lived as the Perilous side grew ever fiercer in the chants as they took back rounds to end the first half in pole position, even despite a drawn out technical pause. Eventually VATIC fell foul to a light pistol push from the Perilous side and dropped the first map.
The second map appeared to be much of the same, initially with some back and forth both in and out of the game, but with the Perilous side eventually running away with the match in a rather uncontested fashion. This saw VATIC drop to the lower bracket prematurely, and Perilous advance to play against the winner of uFrag and the tournaments resident Danish roster.
Though many may have immediately drawn the (admittedly correctly) conclusion that the second round of elimination would be Perilous versus uFrag, however from the start of the game it was obvious that this was not a formality. There were initially a few rounds a piece on the board for either side, but screams from the uFrag skipper Adam “adamxoxo” Rotherham made it clear the favourites were starting to feel some of the heat. Eventually, however, it became clear that these may have just been initial teething problems as uFrag went on to win the map and the series.
Perilous’ ALIG will be next to face uFrag
The rest of the first round bouts went the way of the favourites, except for the Impulse Gaming versus Exertus eSports match that was very much up in the air given neither of the teams had received a tournament seed. The Impulse Gaming side have been turning a few heads so far this event after taking a map off of the VATIC side in the first match of the groups. Exertus had progressed from their group in third place behind Rasta and Perilous.Fury. Therefore it may not be a surprise that the Impulse Gaming side took the series with two maps to one.
The lower bracket and second round of eliminations are now underway, with notable matches including the uFrag – Perilous clash and Molotovs and Marshmallows versus their fellow rowmates playhackz.
