After defeating Heroic in two maps, Gambit avoids facing Natus Vincere in the bottom bracket.
Gambit advanced to the upper bracket semi-finals of the BLAST Premier World Final after defeating Heroic in their first match. The Danes were unable to find success without their star Martin “stavn” Lund, who missed the tournament due to “personal private reasons”, and found themselves on the receiving end of a battering in the first half of Inferno and latter portion of Vertigo.
The victory puts Gambit up against Liquid in their next match on Thursday at 23:30, while Heroic has an extremely difficult matchup as they compete for their tournament survival against Natus Vincere after the CIS side lose their initial encounter in unexpected circumstances.
The tides reversed in the second half, though, as Heroic gradually began to claw back, building momentum into a ten-round streak to reduce the margin. However, a total comeback was not to be, and the one-sided character of the first half came back to haunt the Danish squad as Gambit eventually converted their big lead into a 16-11 victory.
Vertigo got off to a much more contentious start, with Heroic jumping out to a good lead, emerging ahead after a back-and-forth start to go up 7-4. A triple kill round from Sergey “Ax1Le” Rykhtorov to recover a 3vs4 situation was critical in rallying Gambit as they came back into the half, eventually losing by a single round.
The CIS team kept momentum following the side swap and rebounded from a pistol round defeat to establish their authority over Heroic, with opening kills from Vladislav “nafany” Gorshkov and Dmitry “sh1ro” Sokolov assisting Gambit in closing the map, allowing only one more round en route to a 16-10 win.