What was interesting in the group stage of EPICENTER 2019 CS:GO?

There is a day-off at EPICENTER 2019 today due to the moving of teams on the stage and its installment. Together with that, teams will have enough time to have a rest and prepare for the final stage of the tournament. Now, we will recall what was remarkable in the matches of the group stage.

EHOME has shown nothing

There is nothing interesting on the first sight in the fact that the Chinese team has managed to show nothing but if we pay attention to some details, EHOME has exceeded all our expectations, in bad sense, of course.

First of all, EHOME shower a game without ideas at the whole championship. They became exhausted right after the first map where managed to win 12 rounds in a tough battle against Vitality on their Inferno. The team won 1 round on the French opponent's pick, Nuke. In the battle against Heroic, cadiaN from the Danish team was having fun anyway he could and was playing on his score. This didn't stop Heroic from prevailing over EHOME on Inferno with a score of 16-5 and on Nuke with a result of 16-1.

Nuke seems to be the Chinese team's weak spot but why they didn't decide to ban it is still a relevant question. As a result, EHOME played that badly that they won totally 19 rounds on four maps at the tournament, 12 of which were in the very first match. Someone should be the worst one at every tournament and if you ask who receives this not the proudest title at EPICENTER 2019, the answer is pretty obvious.

Crush and Evil Geniuses

Such turn of events can't be called the expected one. Due to Brehze didn't have enough time to arrive to Moscow for the first match with the participation of EG, the last ones had to ask Igor ‘crush’ Shevchenko. The Ukrainian explained their choice with the fact that he had had to talk with the Americans from Evil Geniuses for many times, due to which they made their choice in the favor of the player from HellRaisers without odd thoughts. But according to the rating HLTV 2.0, he played worse than his teammates but, despite this, he became one of the reasons why EG made it to the playoffs after the first match. There, they fought with forZe, which showed that they should not be written off. The match between EG and forZe was over with a score of 2-0 in the favor of the Americans and crush in turn received an unusual experience. He said in an interview that the communication in the American team is way better than in the CIS teams because the less information is provided but it is way accurate than the information that is received by teammates of Russian-speaking teams.

The unsuccessful debut of Virtus.pro

If everything happen in accordance to the predicted scenario in Group A and EHOME left the championship consequently, there were issues with analytics in Group B. Many viewers, including us, considered Virtus.pro to be not the weakest participant of the second quartet, however, the past matches showed that the things are different. VP was close to a victory in the first battle against mousesports and was showing the strong opposition. They won the first map and the third one was over in the third series of extra rounds with a score of 22-19 in the favor of mouze. The clash was even more spectacular in the elimination match against forZe. They won only 3 rounds on the first map and, losing the second map with a score of 0-11, made an epic comeback and finally won with a score of 16-13. On Vertigo, the main star of the team, Jame, didn't show a good performance, with which let his teammates down to a loss. In such a way, the people from AVANGAR together with EHOME left the competition and placed 7th-th in the standings, having earned a consolation prize in the sum of $10,000. The debut of the players under the tag Virtus.pro was unsuccessful and forZe against them made a lot of hype around them. A part of viewers predict the appearance of xsepower in NAVI instead of GuardiaN.

It's worth to remind that Team Vitality and mousesports made it to the semi-final due to the job done and NAVI, Heroic, forZe, and Evil Geniuses became the participants of the quarterfinal matches.

EPICENTER 2019 takes place in Moscow on December 17-22. Crocus Expo Hall has become a venue for the event and the overall prize pool amounts $500,000. The winner will earn the main prize of $250,000. Eight teams have come to Moscow to fight for it, a half of which had received direct invites. VP, EG, NAVI, and Vitality have become the lucky owners of invites and Heroic, mousesports, forZe, and EHOME have passed qualifiers.