Vitality Cruise to a Victory at the BLAST Fall Final 2023
Copenhagen, Denmark (PSF) - Vitality defeated FaZe in the BLAST Fall Final with a complete sweep that concluded with a comeback win on Nuke. Vitality had a great showing at the BLAST Fall Final with new addition William “mezii” Merriman complementing the team well in his first event on his new team.
Vitality put an end to FaZe’s 20-game win streak which was shaping up to be one of the longest streaks in history. FaZe was obliterated in the first map Vertigo, 13-3, a map that all teams ban against Vitality but FaZe chose to ban Inferno instead of Vertigo.
The win increased Vitality’s BLAST ranking, but since both teams in the finals had already qualified for the BLAST World Final the final spot went to the next highest ranked team in the BLAST rankings, Cloud9.
Mathieu “ZywOo” Herbaut took home the 1XBET/HLTV MVP award for his dominating performance during the event averaging a player rating of 1.3+ for all games but one.
Teams that impressed this event were Complexity and Cloud9. Complexity has continued their great run in Counter-Strike 2 (CS2) reaching the top five in the HLTV world rankings for the first time since late 2020.
Cloud9 has slowly been becoming more efficient as a unit stacking up more decisive wins against top tier teams.
Teams that were disappointing include Heroic and Ninjas in Pyjamas (NIP). Heroic used Casper “cadiaN” Møller in what is most likely his final game in a Heroic jersey brining an end to an iconic era in Danish CS. Heroic is down to three players so it was a pipedream to think that they had a chance to win the tournament, but it would have been a good Cinderella story.
NIP have been lackluster since the release of CS2 not being able to get any success in the events they have played in. They have only two wins in the three events they have played since CS2 has released. In the Fall Final, they were outclassed in every facet of the game in their two matches losing, 2-0 to both Natus Vincere and FaZe.
The BLAST World Final takes place on Dec. 13 to Dec. 17 in Abu Dhabi, UAE with the eight teams attending being G2, FaZe, Vitality, MOUZ, ENCE, Heroic, Cloud9 and Natus Vincere.
