ESL Pro League 6 North America Week 1 Recap

The first week of the season featured a few big matches, some upsets, as well as other interesting matches from new rosters. We’ll first look at the matches featuring the big names:

SK, Immortals, Cloud9, Liquid

SK took on Liquid as one of the two opening series on Tuesday the 22nd, and Liquid started off strong, taking Train, but it seems they were fulfilled by that as the got wrecked on Cobblestone. The brand new Cloud9 roster, filled with American players Will “RUSH” Wierzba and Tarik “tarik” Celik, played Counter Logic Gaming on day 1 as well. However, Cloud9 resorted to using the recently-removed Mike ”shroud” Grzesiek as a stand-in for Tim “autimatic” Ta, as the latter was still on vacation. This loss of a star player and lack of integration of new players resulted in a regrettable (for Cloud9 fans) 2-0 win for CLG.

On Wednesday, Liquid blundered as they dropped a very important map to Ghost Gaming on Nuke. It should be noted that Liquid does not play Nuke very often, so it is expected that it’d be close, but dropping a map to a squad with two new players and a stand-in isn’t that impressive. Immortals played against their national rivals SK and boasted a comfortable win on Cobblestone, one of their best maps, and even though they lost the following map, drawing versus SK isn’t something to shake your head at.

Counter Logic, NRG, Misfits, Renegades

This group contains the teams who are in the middle of the pack of North American Pro League, and have had either no or minimal roster moves. CLG played Misfits on day two of week 1, with each squad taking a map with relative ease. Renegades managed to surprise this week as they stole Cobblestone from Immortals despite a very poor performance from David “Jayzwalkingz” Kempner, who has recently departed the roster.

CLG also faced Liquid later on, but as much as CLG would’ve liked to steal more points, this series resulted in six straightforward points for Liquid thanks to strong performances from Jonathan “EliGE” Jablonowski and Russel “Twistzz” Van Dulken. NRG managed to exploit the roster changes in Cloud9 as well (despite having changes of their own) and won Mirage against reddit’s favorite team. To make this win slightly more impressive, Cloud9 played with autimatic as he had returned from vacation at this point.

OpTic, Rogue

The two brand new rosters in this season of Pro League are OpTic Gaming and Rogue. OpTic, who are notably have a lineup completely comprised of high-profile Europeans had three of their players play their first week matches from Europe (that being Adam “friberg” Friberg, Aleksi “allu” Jalli, and Emil “Magisk” Reif). Additionally, Kevin “HS” Tarn had not been announced as the 5th member of the team yet, so OpTic had to rely on Kieth “NAF” Markovic to ring until HS’s services had been fully secured. Due to magical play by NAF and Oscar “mixwell” Canellas, OpTic 2-0’d both Ghost and Rogue.

Rogue have had issues of their own since even before the start of the league, as they have been unable to secure a 5th player to complement the Enigma6 trio and Spencer “Hiko” Martin. Initially they had hoped on securing the Bulgarian AWPer Cvetelin “CeRq” Dimitrov, but he was stolen away to NRG. They had then hoped on playing with up and comer Matthew “WARDELL” Bowman, but had pulled out at the last second. This means they have been left with temporary stand-in Michael “Uber” Stapells. To top it all off Collin “wrath” McSweegan is currently ineligible to play due to his age, so old E6 player Shawn “witmer” Taylor will play for him until he is old enough. This all led to Rogue not only losing 2-0 to OpTic, but losing 2-0 to compLexity as well.

Splyce, Luminosity, compLexity, Ghost

These teams constitute the low end of the league, and most of the time their matches are what you’d expect with few upsets. Splyce, with recent additions David “DAVEY” Stafford and Mitch “mitch” Semago, dropped both maps to NRG, but in an odd series traded blowout victories with Renegades. The Brazilians in Luminosity expectedly lost to SK, as well as dropping two extremely close maps to Misfits. The final match to be touched on from this week was SK vs compLexity, where, unsurprisingly, SK took both maps without much resistance.

Be sure to tune into EPL next week to catch some exciting matchups, including the OpTic roster who has fully moved to the United States, the new Renegades roster, Immortals vs Cloud9, and more. You can find more info about the upcoming matches here on dust2.us.