The Group Stage of the
ESL Major Series Season IX is now finished and the Brackets for the final part of the competition are now known and published. As the top3 players from each group advanced to the playoffs, the 2nd and 3rd will play each others in the Eighth finals while the 1st directly advanced to the Quarter finals. All the matches will be played as best-of-5 and the system will be single Elimination. The first round is planned for Thursday 15th around 13:00 CST!
During the Group Stage, a lot of players were removed due to noshows or inactivity (including some top seeds:
Cooller,
av3k and
Cypher). In Group A, the classic duel match between
strenx and
k1llsen went in favor of the German player for the 1st rank and
Reaper took the 3rd place over
tox1c in a five-mapper.
GaRpY had no problem topping Group B and is followed by
lotn1k and
smoke. Sadly,
fazz decided to give up on duel and left the tournament.
For the Group C rankings, things weren't so easy.
spart1e,
kRoNic and
guismo were perfectly tied for the 1st rank at the end of the Group Stage. The 3 players had to go through bo3 tie-breakers (results can be seen on their respective group matches pages), and
spart1e came out first after being able to take a map from
guismo in the only 3-mapper! Finally, in Group D
Sc00t managed to defeat
agent after a deciding map to take the lead, despite his loss against
reload who's finishing at the third place.
Most of the demos and detailed results from the Group Stage are
available. If some are missing, it simply means the players didn't communicate them.
Update: Some games are live and streamed on
c58. Also
zoot and
owzo should
stream some, starting with
strenx vs
reload.
Links:
Announcement,
Brackets,
Groups -
#esl.quakelive