Review of esports news for the 5th week

IEM Katowice is coming

This week, the qualification round of the largest CS:GO championship in Central and Eastern Europe, IEM Katowice 2023, took place. In the so-called Play-in, 24 teams competed for promotion in knockout matches. You can view the qualification spider below.

The main matches will take place next weekend, February 10-12, at the Spodek Arena in Katowice, Poland. All-star CS:GO teams such as FaZe, NaVi, Outsiders, G2, Heroic, Liquid, Vitality and MOUZ are waiting for highly skilled players. ESL, the organizer of the tournament, is offering a prize pool of one million dollars. This is a considerable amount. The winners will take home 400,000 dollars, which is approximately nine million crowns.

Bad Luck Follows SINNERS

The path of the domestic CS:GO team SINNERS ends right before the IEM Rio promotion. After two official victories, after the defeat from the Polish 9INE, the cult FPS says goodbye to the hope of participating in one of the largest tournaments in the world. In the first match, SINNERS met with the Bulgarian team 500, which they beat with a score of 16:13 and advanced to the quarterfinals of the qualification. A group of Sengals were already waiting for them there, and they greatly tormented our people. At one point they were leading Sengal 15-11. But the “sinners” did not give up and the match went into overtime. Things didn’t look much better for the SINNERS from the start, as Sengal won three consecutive winning laps. However, after the change of sides, the score changed, and it came to the second overtime, in which SINNERS won with a final score of 22:19.

This result guaranteed SINNERS a place in the semi-finals of the open qualifier, which was the last necessary step to qualify for the closed qualifier. After the tension that accompanied the entire match against the Sengal team, the exhausted SINNERS faced the aforementioned 9INE, who turned out to be fatal for them, losing 7:16 on nuke and vertigo cards. Thus, the dream of promotion collapsed. Thus, 9INE secured access to the closed qualifiers, where big names such as ENCE, BIG and Sprout are waiting for them. I hope SINNERS do better next time.