As a live draft with no surprises concluded in Malta, the first-round matchups for the BLAST Bounty Season 2 Finals have been confirmed.
The four lower-seeded teams selected their opponents from the four higher-seeded teams, and as the first team to pick, paiN had priority in selection.
As paiN's ranking in the Global Standings slips (currently ranked 29th), biguzera emphasized the importance of VRS points, but still chose Astralis as their quarterfinal opponent.
"Regarding Astralis, the first point is that their map pick is Ancient, and we don't play Ancient," the Brazilian IGL said. "That's a very important point for us. We share a lot of maps that I want to play, and the last time we faced them, we beat them. Of course, in CS that's not a hard-and-fast rule; it's sometimes more like football, where you can never predict the outcome, but yeah, basically that's it."
FaZe chose The MongolZ for their opening match, emphasizing the extra day of preparation for this matchup and the importance of VRS points—the Mongolian team is ranked just above them. enkay J added that the absence of Mongolian coach maaRaa was not a factor, while Techno stated that without the pressure, their team's rookies might play more freely.
3DMAX was left with only two choices: MOUZ and tournament favorites Spirit. They selected the former for their quarterfinal matchup. "We could have thought we had a shot at beating Spirit," wasiNk said, "but I took the map pool into account. Honestly, I wanted to pick MOUZ from day one. With their roster changes, we wanted this matchup, and we felt it was achievable. But before this, we made other picks, and today was the perfect time to secure this choice."
As flashie predicted, Liquid is left with only Spirit as their option. With JT taking over as in-game leader and Jorko stepping in as the team's inexperienced new sniper, Liquid has already pulled off an upset in the online stage, defeating Vitality and G2 to advance to Malta. And as they face Spirit in their first match of the LAN stage, their journey will only become increasingly difficult.
"Yes, I think they definitely earned some respect because they beat Vitality," magixx said when asked about Liquid's online run. "Of course, everyone can say it's just a warm-up after the off-season, but... we could have lost earlier ourselves (smiles). I've seen that happen, I guess twice."