ESL Pro League Season 15 Preview
After almost a month of group stage and weird matches we finally get to the playoffs, where we are up for the most quality cs in a long time. This is the last big tournament before RMR kicks in and although the prize pool isn't particularly big (only 175k for first place) every team is serious about winning it.
Group Stage results
We've seen some surprises throughout the group stage but in general it's mostly all the the teams that should have made it to playoffs. At the same time there are a few teams who shouldn't mislead you just because of their good run in their group - Movistar Riders, fnatic and FURIA
Movistar Riders went 5-0 and while that's something nobody could expect from them, it's not too big of a deal in a group with Party Astronauts and GODSENT, or unstable BIG and Liquid. The only "real" upset by Movistar was against Gambit but in hindsight after seeing Gambit's performance against other teams it all makes sense too.
fnatic did a great job stealing playoffs spot while playing with Peppzor and poizon, but let's just look at their matches in more detail. They dropped a map to LookingForOrg (who ended up being the worst team in the entire EPL with -77 end result), had a somewhat lucky win against MOUZ where they went 9-9 16-10 and 0-1 2-1 after, and a win against dead G2 who didn't even make it to playoffs. Despite the obvious roster struggles for fnatic these results are still far from anything convincing.
FURIA went 4-1 only losing in the last match against Faze but their situation is similar to Movistar Riders, only arguably even worse. Both of the main favorites for this group, Vitality and VP, didn't even get out of the group and teams like ENCE or Sprout are never to be taken seriously. FURIA played good in general but it's still a big question how they will keep this up against more solid teams in playoffs.
Playoffs Round 1
With some of the key points of the group stage out of the way it's time to look at the first Playoffs set of matches, and they look a lot more obvious on paper than it should actually be
It seems like Heroic should have no issues closing this out in a quick 2-0, their mappool is a lot stronger and they are better individually plus Liquid always have a massive liability with nitr0 and shox. However, we can still see the rest of NA guys stepping up, NAF and EliGE are both capable of winning the game alone and if they get help from oSee as well it will be a really hard game for Heroic. The Danes didn't look very comfortable against Complexity and even Evil Geniuses, and stood no chance against Navi. A big "if" of this matchup will be whether Liquid can show up and impress everyone, but if they manage to do it we can definitely see a close fight with 3 maps and potential upset from Liquid
Perhaps the most boring match we will see and realistically the most irrelevant one. Whoever wins here will most likely get eliminated in quarter finals against Movistar Riders and even if they don't they would have to play the winner of NIP vs Heroic/Liquid where there is definitely no chance for either of them. Based on the group stage performance though, ENCE seem to be a much better team with decent teamwork and they did recently beat fnatic in a bo1 on top of that. Of course, fnatic can always play above the expected especially if poizon goes wild as he did in group stage, but rest of the players don't seem too reliable and in the worst case scenario ENCE should win 2-1
Whether it's the recency bias for Astralis or the fact that Entropiq played like shit in ESL Challenger, the fact is that Astralis are extremely overrated for this matchup. Although Entropiq played group stage almost a month ago we shouldn't forget how they played against G2, MOUZ and even NIP. Astralis also showed up pretty well considering they got a new awper but losing 2 maps in a row from 15-7 and 15-13, or almost losing 15-9 and choking 11-4 13-16 against Navi isn't really a playoffs team performance. Even in their match against AGO they had some struggles. On top of that we have Entropiq's mappool, they permaban inferno which is a huge hit on Astralis, and the rest of the maps are good enough to at the very least make it competitive. However, with maps like mirage and dust2 or even overpass and ancient, Entropiq seem to have a serious edge here and the odds are straight up disrespectful
Gambit are just a sad team for this tournament, there is barely anything left from "number 2 team in the world" who used to compete with Navi for the right to be called the best. Other than Hobbit and sometimes sh1ro nobody really had anything to show during group stage, and their results are just a catastrophe considering their supposed level. Losing 1-2 to Movistar Riders (including 6-0 t side ancient to 9-16), double comeback against BIG with 20-22 and 16-14, dropping a map to GODSENT after barely winning first 16-14.. If you didn't see the players' nicknames you would probably assume it's some average tier2-3 team. Faze on the other hand are looking fresh and it's almost as if everyone is fired up to win again, even rain. After their success in Katowice they didn't drop off back to dogshit, and although there are still a lot of things to work on we could see Faze stay in the top for a while. For this match in particular we should see 3 maps just because of the mappool, but in terms of the current form and overall results Faze are definitely the favorite to win and should be taking it 2-1
What about the champions?
We could speculate for a really long time here but in playoffs anything can happen and instead it's better to say who has the best chance to get the trophy, from highest to lowest
Whether this order is close to reality or not we shall see in the upcoming week, but this is of course not an indication for you to bet based on this order. The positions here are based mostly on the individual skill level and the current standing in playoffs + potential opponents in case of winning first matches. As for the actual bets, we can only go with the first round of matches for right now and then act depending on the situation
Bets🤔
Faze vs Players
・3% Faze ML @ 1.793
・3% over2.5 @ 2.08
・1% Faze 2-1 @ 3.8
Entropiq vs Astralis
・3% over2.5 @ 2.08
・1% Entropiq ML @ 2.27
Heroic vs Liquid
・1% over2.5 @ 2.21
2% combo ENCE ML + Faze ML @ 2.59
1% combo ENCE ML + Faze ML + Heroic ML + Entropiq ML @ 8.32