Team Vitality has won the Blast Premier Fall Finals Counter-Strike 2 tournament in Copenhagen, Denmark, beating Faze Clan 2-0 in the grand final.
The win is the first major trophy for Vitality in Counter-Strike 2. Despite being the defending Major champions, having won the Blast Paris Major earlier in the year, the team has had some unexpected roster changes heading into CS2 which delayed their start to the game. This was the first major tournament with their new roster and it is fair to say they impressed and will likely be a tough team to beat going forward.
Map one of the grand finals was somewhat of a surprise, with Vitality taking a convincing 13-3 on Vertigo. Faze never managed to get going, despite the overwhelming support from the crowd and Vitality took advantage of their slow start to take a quick win.
Map two on Nuke started out much better for Faze who took the first half 7-5, but Vitality quickly evened it up to 7-7. The teams then traded rounds fairly evenly all the way to 11-11, but then Vitality won two rounds on the bounce to win the map, and crucially, the tournament.
Both teams topped their group in the opening rounds of the tournament, with Faze taking down NiP and Cloud9 in Group A and Vitality taking down Heroic and Complexity in Group B. This meant both teams were sent straight to the semi-finals of the tournament, where both matches went to all three games.
Faze Clan managed to take down Complexity in what was a rematch of the first major CS2 final at IEM Sydney. Unfortunately, this match was not quite as close as that one ended up being, with Faze taking convincing 13-10 and 13-7 wins in maps one and three to take the win, however, they were dominated on Nuke where they lost 13-5.
Vitality had a closer match against Cloud9, which kicked off in style with a 1v5 ace clutch in the opening pistol round. The first map on Mirage would end up going to overtime before Vitality picked up the win 16-13. Cloud9 then fought back on Nuke to even things up with a 13-9 win and set up a crucial final map. However, Vitality proved to be better on the day taking Inferno 13-11 to secure their place in the final.
The win sees Vitality take home $200,000 for first place, while Faze takes home $85,000 for second. Complexity and Could9 both get $40,000 for their top-four finish.
Both teams will now head to the Blast Premier World Finals which are due to take place in Abu Dhabi in mid-December and have a $1 million prize pool.
For the 2024 season, Blast has announced that the Spring finals will take place at Wembley Arena in London, with tickets available now, while the Fall Finals will return to Copenhagen later in the year.
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