Owen “smooya” Butterfield led his teammates to victory after a decisive final match against Buzzkill Esports. This means that fish123 will walk away with £2250 + five tickets to epicLAN 28. For more information on this match, click here to view a recap from UKCSGO.com contributor Michael Moriarty.
epicLAN 27 has been and gone, and the £4000 event has seen it’s winners crowned handing £2250 to leading mix team fish123.
The 27th edition of epicLAN is well underway. The stage has been set for each team to battle it out for their share of £4000 + event tickets, with a full breakdown of the prize pool found here.
The first day has seen some highlights, with strong favorites coming out on top.
ESL have announced today a new event for the top teams competing in their European National Championship tournaments. The National Championships are the top level national leagues in each European country, which include the UK and Ireland’s ESL Premiership, who’s Summer Season concluded last weekend with Endpoint lifting the trophy. The first iteration of the ESL Pro European Championship (EPEC) is set to be held between October 13th-14th in Poznan, Poland for the four strongest teams from the National Championships. As part of this, Endpoint and fish123 have been handed invites to the online qualifiers for the tournament.
After another exciting season of ESL Premiership, four teams emerged from group play to fight it out for their share of the £12000 prize pool. The finals saw two BO3 semi-finals followed by a BO5 final.
From Group A, Fish123 topped the group only losing one match to Team Endpoint. Endpoint finished second in the group after losing to Fish123 and taking a surprise 16-3 loss to London Lynx.
From Group B, Wind and Rain finished first in the group with an unbeaten regular season. The rest of the group was very tight with WEHAWT edging out the competition to finish second and qualifying for the finals.
The end of epic23 saw just two teams remaining, as fish123 came up against the Bulldog Mix in the game to claim the £1900 first prize place. With this being a weighted best-of-five, fish123 have a small advantage over their opponents thanks to their upper-bracket run.
The first map was Overpass, where fish123 claimed the pistol round and first anti-eco on their CT-side, before Bulldog secured a forcebuy in round three to get onto the board. From there the Bulldog started to claim a small lead, with robiin and jenko impressing, before fish123 started to get back into the game and even it up.
A small break occurred because of some networking issues, before the game finally resumed. On resumption, MiGHTYMAX and co. started pushing on for a 9-6 lead at the half.
The second half began with Bulldog Mix taking the pistol round and the following two anti-ecos. But fish123 prevent Bulldog from taking the lead through securing the first buy round as smooya and Sliggy kept his team in the game.
Although fish123 were looking to take the lead, Bulldog started to return fire. Two good rounds from Kryptix brought his team close to evening the game up before fish secured an eco win after smooya uses a salvaged AWP. Although Bulldog picked up the next round, smooya secured four kills to put his team on to map point whilst reaching 31 kills himself. Although Bulldog started the final round off well, fish took the map 16-12.
31 kills from smooya as he shows off his guns (Photo: Alex “Xela” Harris)
Next up was Mirage, and it was fish123 who started their T-side with the pistol round, before Bulldog opened back on the first buy round. They secured the following round before keita and co. returned back to retain the lead.
From there Bulldog were starting to come into the game once again, with Surreal and co. pushing on to keep the game close. Although fish123 took another round to secure a lead at the half, it was just a narrow one as Bulldog secured the final rounds of the half to keep it close at 8-7.
The second half began with fish123 securing the pistol round on their CT-side, but Bulldog came out to secure a force-buy win to go into the lead. But it wasn’t going to last for long as fish123 came back in the first buy round to even the match up once again.
The two teams then started to trade rounds as fish123 narrowly took the lead before Barrage lined up two to even the match up once again. The two sides then traded rounds once again as they both sat on 14 rounds before fish123 eventually claimed map, match, series and championship point on a forcebuy. From there fish123 pushed to the end and secured the final round, with smooya securing 32 kills in the map for a 16-14 win.
fish123 (3–0) Bulldog Mix
Default 1–0
Overpass 16–12
Mirage 16–14
The Elimination Bracket for epic23 began just after the groups came to an end last night. With the first round of matches over and the remaining bracket set to begin – here’s a brief recap of the results from the first round of games.
After a long UK Masters season, the final two teams heading for Insomnia are confirmed. With there being four teams heading into the play-offs, only two could survive for the i60 showdown.
UK Masters Season 3, or Spring 2017 as they like to call it, has reached its final pre-lan stages – the playoffs. The top four teams from the weekly round-robin have qualified for the playoff stages of the UK Masters Spring season which is set to take place on April 1st/2nd. This best-of-three double elimination playoff will finish with just two teams left standing to compete at the live stage finals at Insomnia60 later that month.
Today ESL announced the talent lineup for the ESL Premiership finals being held this weekend with FM eSports taking on fish123 in a best of 5 series taking place in their Leicester Studios.
The talent list includes the likes of Alex “Machine” Richardson, known for his CSGO casting and desk hosting across the world and previous ESL Head Admin Graham “Messioso” Pitt
The full talent lineup for the event is below:
Remember you can still purchase tickets to ESL’s event at their eventbrite page here. Our team will be there covering the finals and we hope to see a crowd who are ready for some exciting Counter Strike to be played. You’ll also be able to catch the finals on the ESL CSGO Twitch channel on Saturday the 18th March starting from 4PM.
