Liquid survives marathon to claim Legends seat
With Liquid and Evil Geniuses already qualified with a 3-0 record, the teams had to play each other to decide who gets the Legend status without playing any games in Brazil. Despite the teams being already qualified, this match is still very important, as it gets the winning team one whole stage ahead of the competition and closer to the major title.
EG has been looking a lot more solid since ESL Pro League Season 16 and that was shown during the IEM Road to Rio Americas RMR by qualifying without taking a single loss. Liquid did the same but it was not as surprising since the team reached the grand final of the same EPL and was looking to further claim themselves as the kings of NA and all of America.
The first map was Ancient, picked by Liquid, as the team is looking to regain confidence on that map after the tough loss against Cloud9 some days ago. Liquid started off pretty well winning the T-side pistol and two more for free, before losing three in a row. Rinse and repeat, as EG also gave away the three following rounds. The score was 6-3 and EG, on the back of Tsvetelin "CeRq" Dimitrov, went on a nine-round run to reach the half ahead 9-6.
Evil Geniuses entered the second half on fire as they took five in a row to bring the game to a 14-6 score. Liquid replied in the same way, by tightening EG's economy, and managed to tie the game up 15-15, sending the game to overtime.
Overtime started with Liquid striking first and leading at the side change 17-16. After EG tied the game, Keith "NAF" Markovic got comfortable inside of the A-site and got his team to a map point round after a triple kill. With the chance to close the map, Liquid fumbled a B-site exec and the game went to a second OT.
This time rounds got crazier with both teams throwing everything at each other. EG got all rounds on the CT-side of this overtime and had three chances to win Liquid's map pick. Regardless of the lead, EG couldn't close the map and a third OT was needed.
The third time's a charm as Liquid finally put the map to rest with a 25-23 score after winning all the CT-side rounds and needing only one on the T-side to finish it.
Overpass was the second map, picked by EG and things started pretty rough for them. Liquid managed to get the CT-side pistol round plus two more and Evil Geniuses did the same after, tying the game up 3-3. After that, it was the Josh "oSee" Ohm and NAF show, with both players ending the half on 20 and 19 kills, respectively. Despite Timothy "autimatic" Ta's 15 kills, his team only managed one more round before halftime, with Liquid taking a commanding 11-4 lead.
Things were looking set up for Liquid to get a 2-0 win. Despite this, EG got off to a good second-half start, winning the first three rounds. The teams started going back and forth, with autimatic helping his team chip away the lead from Liquid, getting from four to 11 rounds while Liquid only went from 11 to 14. EG continued to win round after round and tied the game up 14-14. After that Liquid woke up, got one, but lost round 30, with the map needing to go to overtime, just like Ancient.
Liquid got the better of EG in the first half of OT, taking two T-side rounds to give them heavy favor entering the side switch. EG initially mounted a comeback on their offense, but Liquid managed to piece it together in the final rounds of OT to earn another tightly contested win to secure the map 19-17 and take the series 2-0.
Evil GeniusesLiquid| Evil Geniuses |
K - D | +/- | ADR | KAST | Rating 2.0 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 Timothy 'autimatic' Ta |
76 - 59 | +17 | 91.0 | 73.8% | 1.28 |
 Sanzhar 'neaLaN' Iskhakov |
61 - 61 | +0 | 87.0 | 70.2% | 1.13 |
 Tsvetelin 'CeRq' Dimitrov |
56 - 46 | +10 | 63.9 | 66.7% | 1.04 |
| Vincent 'Brehze' Cayonte |
49 - 62 | -13 | 65.0 | 60.7% | 0.84 |
 Jadan 'HexT' Postma |
30 - 60 | -30 | 49.6 | 58.3% | 0.66 |
| Liquid |
K - D | +/- | ADR | KAST | Rating 2.0 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Keith 'NAF' Markovic |
67 - 50 | +17 | 94.7 | 72.6% | 1.26 |
| Jonathan 'EliGE' Jablonowski |
64 - 60 | +4 | 80.3 | 69.0% | 1.11 |
| Josh 'oSee' Ohm |
60 - 50 | +10 | 74.4 | 71.4% | 1.10 |
 Mareks 'YEKINDAR' Gaļinskis |
57 - 58 | -1 | 71.0 | 61.9% | 0.98 |
| Nick 'nitr0' Cannella |
39 - 55 | -16 | 55.4 | 70.2% | 0.84 |
The win earns Liquid a seat at the Legends Stage, while Evil Geniuses will continue their Rio venture in the Challengers Stage.
