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Astralis have ensured themselves the top spot in the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive BLAST Premier Fall Groups competition after fleshing out a narrow 19-17 victory over Vitality on Friday in the group final.
The all-Danish CS:GO team got off to a rough start in the competition, suffering a defeat at the hands of Ninjas in Pyjamas in the first round by a score of 16-10. However, Astralis was able to come back to the bottom bracket of the group and win both of their games against OG (16-9) and NiP (16-9) before gaining the opportunity to play Vitality in the group final.
Benjamin “blameF” Bremer, one of the players for Astralis, was pleased with the triumph against Vitality, but he cautioned the squad that they ought to look out for the missteps that they had made, particularly in the early part of the match.
“I’m happy with the result but I still think there is a lot of stuff that we need to fix and improve,” blameF said in a post-match interview with James Banks.
Given how well Mathieu “ZywOo” Herbaut and the rest of the Vitality team had been performing throughout, Astralis was believed to be the underdogs when competing against Vitality, with a +145 odds placed on the former and a -166.67 odds on the latter with the top Esport betting sites. Astralis came out on top in the group final because of the team’s concerted effort, which was fought out on Mirage and included a lot of back-and-forth action. Asger “Farlig” Jensen, an AWPer, finished the game with the highest kills for Astralis (29), but Andreas “Xyp9x” Hjsleth equally stood out. He finished the match with 26 kills, and he also had the best highlight of the match, which was a quad kill whilst also holding the B bombsite.
“[There are] a lot of mistakes that we shouldn’t commit. It would be nice if we didn’t do that because that can be a bit stressful sometimes. But yeah, of course, I’m happy. I don’t think we expected to go through first in this group and also a lot of people said we got lucky in IEM Cologne (Note: Astralis finished top four at that tournament), so it felt good to show that we might not be number four in the world but we can still beat the top 10 teams.”
After the conclusion of the matches in Group A, Astralis, Vitality, NiP, and OG will only compete on the BLAST Premier Fall Groups servers during the knockout stage the following week. This stage will determine which six of the 12 teams competing will advance to the Fall Finals, which will take place in November. The second day of competition in this tournament began yesterday with Group B featuring Natus Vincere, G2, Team Liquid, and Complexity.
Each of the competitors will find out who they will face in the Gauntlet round. This stage will begin on Thursday, August 25, and will follow a best of three single-elimination formats all odds for game day are available on GG.Bet.
