G2 Overcome Adversity at IEM Dallas 2024, Defeating Vitality in Grand Final
G2 Esports lifted the trophy at IEM Dallas after defeating Team Vitality to finish off their fairy tale run at the event. G2 came into IEM Dallas as a team that was far and away from the favorite to win the event with them having to play with stand-in Jake “Stewie2K” Yip filling in for the absent Rasmus “HooXi” Nielsen. Stewie2K was the only North American who made it to the stage after G2 eliminated the mostly North and South American roster of Team Liquid to advance to the main stage for the quarterfinals.
HooXi who was attending his sister’s wedding left a hole in the G2 squad at the in-game leader (IGL) spot putting Nikola “NiKo” Kovač who is primarily one of their entry-fraggers into the role of IGL for the event.
The Grand Final went to all three maps with each map being a hotly contested venture for both teams. The first map Inferno was G2’s map pick and would end up going to double overtime after G2 made an impressive comeback to send the game into extra rounds. Vitality would take the first three rounds of overtime going into map point at the switching of the sides in the first overtime. G2 would win the next five rounds before dropping another round to Vitality, but G2 would finish off the final two rounds on their Counter-Terrorists (CT) side to win the map.
Vitality’s map pick Anubis would be one of the best maps played of the entire year. G2 would falter throughout the map and find themselves in a dire situation being down 12-5 and on the verge of going into the decider Nuke with zero momentum. Suddenly a switch flipped on for G2 and they would string along seven straight rounds to send the game into overtime. Vitality would regain their composure after the comeback and finally finish off G2 in overtime with the map finishing with a 16-13 score in favor of Vitality. William “mezii” Merriman and Shahar “flameZ” Shushan were huge performers for Vitality for the entirety of the map with Mezii having huge moments towards the end of the map especially in overtime.
This series was a breath of fresh air with many of the quarter and semifinals games being complete sweeps in the way of 2-0 series score lines. The win on Anubis by Vitality sent the series to the final and decider map Nuke.
The map was extremely competitive during the first half with each team going on win streaks and going into the side switch at six rounds a piece. After the half, it was all G2’s game starting the half off with a five round win streak and Ilya “m0NESY” Osipov took the game into his own hands by showing why he is one of the best players in the world. Vitality would put up a meager back-to-back round win before losing the final two rounds that sealed their faith of finishing second at another tier one event in the past month. The biggest disappointment of map three was Vitality’s star player Mathieu “ZywOo” Herbaut who simply failed to show up for the map finishing with a 9-16 stat line and an overall rating of 0.60 making it one of his worst performances of the year. Vitality had also just recently finished second at ESL Pro League Season 19 losing to MOUZ in the Grand Finals.
The crowd roared as G2 who over the length of the tournament been given the moniker of “GSTEW” rose Stewie2K over their head in celebration of winning their first tournament of 2024. The crowd was completely behind the team for the entire time the team was on the main stage and was rewarded by getting to see a North American win an event on home soil since the IEM Chicago back in 2019 with Team Liquid beating ENCE. The fitting part about all of this is that Liquid team had none other than the infamous “Smoke Criminal” Stewie2K on the winning roster as well.
via ESLCS / X
M0NESY was named MVP of the event putting up an overall rating of 1.35 and an incredible 1.53 impact rating for the duration of the event.
It was not an easy road for G2 to make it to the Grand Finals. On their way to victory, they defeated MOUZ (the number one team in the world), FaZe (the best team since Counter-Strike 2 has been launched) and 9z another underdog team that was poised to write their own fairy tale ending in Dallas this year.
This result, however, has split the fans of G2 on two sides of a newly found disagreement. Do they stick with their existing core and bring back HooXi, or do they ride the high and bring Stewie2K onto the roster full time to see how far this fairy tale can last.
It is pretty obvious that they will stick with HooXi, but this does open an avenue for Stewie2K to return to the scene if he so wishes too which from his remarks on X and in interviews this event has brought back his love for the game and for competing professionally.
