Review of ESL Pro League Season 13

Incredible performance from Heroic and Gambit Esports

The review of the group stage covered the fact that Gambit and Heroic managed to show a wonderful show and had no loss at the group stage. The teams completed the stage with the statistics 5-0 which deserves due respect. The tendency of their domination continued in the playoff. There Heroic beat FURIA Esports with 2-0 and made it to the grand final where they defeated Gambit Esports with 3-2. Even though the latter lost, a lot of discussions have been instigated. The team beat NiP 2-0 and could show an extremely serious battle at the decisive match against Heroic.

In this Bo5 meeting, the teams had to take a series of additional rounds twice to define the winner. On Inferno, for example, the teams completed the battle with 19-17, and Train was unable to finish even with two series of additional rounds. There the meeting ended with 28-26 for Heroic. The СЕО of Gambit Konstantin Pikiner assumes that Train became a morally decisive map in this battle:

"We've had experience of playing Bо5, but it used to finish with four maps and last for about four hours. Yesterday we played approximately seven hours, and some of our players felt powerless on the seventh map. During the game I understood that everything would become clear on Train - who wins the marathon of overtimes, wins the series. This is what happened. The players, of course, were very disappointed but all of them were happy for Axile who was playing hard during the whole tournament and deserved the MVP title".

After the end of the tournament both participants in the grand final got their reward. Gambit Esports took second place and gained a monetary reward of $85,000? 1,400 BLAST Premier rating points and also 1,000 ESL Pro Tour points, and, additionally, the team took first place in the list of the best CS:GO rosters. The team became the first CIS roster, except for NAVI, that managed to make it to the leaders of the best CS:GO teams according to HLTV. Meanwhile, Heroic's win at the event resulted in a considerable monetary reward of $200,000, and also gained an invitation to BLAST Premier Global Finals 2021 with the prize pool of $1,000,000. Ax1le, as it was already mentioned in Konstantin's speech, deserved the award of the most valuable player which must have definitely pleased him. The esportsman showed a very good performance during the whole championship and managed to finish participation in the championship with the rating of 1,24 which let him get higher than his teammates.

We should not ignore cadiaN, a member of the winning team. The Danish player must be the only gamer that came back from the analytical activity. Gamers usually finish their esports career and switch to commenting or analysis of tournaments. But cadiaN decided to come back to gaming and now he shows great results. What we can only say about the decisive round played at ESL Pro League Season 13. Kapser ‘cadiaN’ Møller decided to stab sh1ro to get money for AWP at the decisive round, and alongside killed three more opponents. The moment was so bright and interesting that the commenters who were watching the meeting said that “cadiaN passed CS:GO”, even though this victory did not happen at the Major tournament.

However, it is better to see this once than to read about it 100 times.