The ESL One: Road to Rio has begun and it is full of surprises and upsets, with Copenhagen winning from contact and Moviestars upsetting Mousesports. We had a very interesting game between Ninjas in Pyjamas and Dignitas as the current lineup of Dignitas used to be the previous lineup of NIP back in the days which used to be a crowd favorite as it had some stars like – Christopher ‘Get_Right’ Alesund and Richard ‘Xizt’ Landström. Although we saw the Ninjas easily winning both the maps 16-9 on train and 16-3 on vertigo and closing out the series 2-0 comfortably.
The first map of the game was train which was picked by Dignitas and NIP chose to start at ct side. According to the previous stats for train, NIP had a zero percentage of winning the map and Dignitas looked stronger in comparison. The first round started with Fredrik ‘Rez’ Sterner getting a quad kill with his Usp and giving NIP a good start. Håkon ‘Hallzerk’ Fjærli tried to pull some rounds for Dignitas but failed which ended them losing the first half 6:9. Although the second half eco round saw some great shots from ‘Get_Right’ and he tried to pull his team back in the game. NIP replied back with the first gun round win and we saw some heroic rounds from ‘Lekro’ and ‘Rez’ throughout the game and it was just 3 rounds for Dignitas in the second half and NIP closed the first map 16:9 which was quite unexpected seeing their stats on this particular map.
The second map of the game was Vertigo which was picked by NIP and it was a much stronger map of the Ninjas than compared to train. The first round of the game was picked up by Dignitas with Patrik ‘f0rest’ Lindberg taking a 4K with his Usp and defusing the bomb just on time and giving a lead to Dignitas on the first round of the map. However, NIP did a force buy in the next round which saw Nicolas ‘Plopski’ Zamora taking two kills and ‘Friberg’ being knifed by ‘Rez’ from behind giving NIP the round and equaling the scoreline to 1-1. In the next round, we saw ‘Get_right’ hitting some amazing shots and securing the round for his team but after that, it was a total massacre for team Dignitas as the Ninjas went crazy with ‘Plopski’ getting a total of 16 kills just in the first half and closing out the half 13-2 which was totally unexpected as Dignitas started quite decently on the map and were expecting a much better result in the first half. The second half started with Tim ‘nawwk’ Jonasson going insane and getting 6 kills in the round which also included one of his team kills and the Ninjas quite easily closed out the map 16-3 and won the series 2-0.
