The Intel Grand Slam winners FaZe made their way and qualified for the CS:GO Major and also secured a trip to Rio, but it was never easy.
The roster came from a 2-0 start in the Swiss stage and went down to the last chance qualifier and also faced Cloud9 in the decider series.
Both teams faced each other in the grand final of the ESL Pro League season 17. In the game, FaZe was down 14-5 on Mirage, no thanks to their poor start on T-side.
However, karrigan led the troops to a comeback on the first map of the series as they forced overtime and won four consecutive rounds due to another brilliant individual showing, this time from broky, which helped them into the next map of the series.
FaZe secured an 11-4 halftime lead on T Side as Inferno was straightforward as they converted the pistol round to win 16-9. Twistzz and rain went nuclear as ropz also dropped big numbers to push them over the finish line.
The result means that Cloud9 has gone through four best-of-three series in a row in two days in a bid to qualify, which meant that FaZe had more rest time.
Cloud9 coach Konstantin “groove” Pikiner let his opinion out post-match stating that the grouping wasn’t fair.
“To be honest, I don’t think it was so fair in my opinion because of the group, [the] draw wasn’t balanced,” he said.
Meanwhile, IEM Rio 2023 is getting closer, and both FaZe and Cloud9 will be part of the sixteen-team competition scheduled for April in Brazil.
The competition starts on April 17 before the final CS:GO Major on May 8 in Paris. Meanwhile, one of the big names in the competition, Astralis, missed out on qualifying after losing the elimination game against Ninjas in Pyjamas at Europe RMR B.
Daniel Ademiju Idowu
