Upsets abound in ESL Challenger Melbourne OQ Day 1

Day one of the ESL Challenger Melbourne North American Open Qualifier #1 has come and gone with a few surprises in it. Most notably, ESL Challenger League NA S47 teams Elevate and Limitless have already been knocked out of the competition by Advanced squad G3 in two close matches.

G3, who are currently 9-1 in Advanced this season, played spoiler as they took Elevate to overtime on Ancient and secured a crucial 16-14 victory. Following that victory, G3 then matched up against another ECL team in Limitless. While Nikolaos "PoseidoNN" Antoniou is away in Greece, Lane "RiFT" Hardesty is notably stepping in for Limitless at this time. Playing on Anubis, G3 did not need any sort of overtime as they cruised to a 13-10 victory to put themselves in the semi-finals.

Elsewhere, Rocket dispatched Revel to set up a quarter-finals game against MIGHT. FLUFFY AIMERS had a simple route to their quarter-finals matchup against LAG, the latter of whom had a small scare against Strife.

Finally, current first-place in ECL Mythic did not face too much trouble in their bracket run as they now prepare to play a new-look E-Xolos Lazer squad who had taken down LOS in the prior round.

Matches begin again later tonight as the seven teams look to claim two spots into the ESL Challenger Melbourne 2024 North American Closed Qualifier where Party Astronauts and NRG are already waiting.

One of G3, Rocket, or MIGHT will earn one spot into the Closed Qualifier while one of FLUFFY AIMERS, LAG, Mythic, or E-Xolos Lazer will also earn a spot.

Below are tonight's matches, which are set to kick off at 06:00PM: