What to expect from Liquid v. Eternal Fire at BLAST Open Lisbon 2025

Liquid will play Eternal Fire this Thursday, March 20th at 09:30AM in the opening round of the BLAST Open Lisbon 2025 group B, which funnily starts in Copenhagen, Denmark. The group stage uses the double-elimination format, so whoever loses, will be one step closer to an early elimination.

Liquid will need to be on top of their game again

Liquid narrowly defeated Eternal Fire recently at ESL Pro League Season 21, and if anything, that series showed that at least three Liquid players need to step up fragging-wise to secure the victory. On that occasion, Keith "NAF" Markovic, Russell "Twistzz" Van Dulken, and Roland "ultimate" Tomkowiak had major contributions.

They have also only reached the playoffs once this season, while Eternal Fire made deep runs in many of the tournaments they have attended this year.

• The result could be decided on how well ultimate plays against woxic, one of the best AWPers in the past 12 months.

• NertZ might need to be the X-factor this time around, especially to counter XANTARES

• Liquid have a solid Inferno, which is a map that Eternal Fire are inconsistent

Eternal Fire tend to play well in debuts

Despite losing to Liquid recently, Eternal Fire are undoubtedly playing better this season as they reached the playoffs of all the first four big tournaments of 2025. They also generally start tournaments strong, having won all their opening matches in 2025, while Liquid only had a successful debut at BLAST Bounty Season 1.

• Despite having an off-game versus Liquid recently, XANTARES are one of the best players in the world

• MAJ3R has way more experience than Twistzz as an IGL

• They are exceedingly great in opening matches

Previous matchups

Liquid and Eternal Fire played just once in the past six months, in the aforementioned EPL S21 match. Liquid beat them 2-0 (13-11 on Inferno, 19-17 on Train).

Likely vetoes

It's hard to imagine that Eternal Fire will pick Train again as they lost the map to Liquid in EPL S21 and have a negative record on it so far. That said, this is how we imagine the veto will play out, in case Eternal Fire let Liquid ban first.

• Liquid remove Nuke (Eternal Fire's second-best map)

• Eternal Fire remove Ancient (their permaban)

• Liquid pick Inferno (they're 4-1 in it in the past three months)

• Eternal Fire pick Anubis (their home map)

• Liquid remove Mirage (they banned it against Eternal Fire at EPL S21)

• Eternal Fire remove Train (they lost it last time)

• Dust2 is left over as the decider (a sort of neutral map for both teams)