DreamHack Open Cluj-Napoca, the second-to-last event in the DreamHack circuit, just started on the 29th of October in the Romanian city of Cluj-Napoca. CS:GO’s seventh consecutive Major features the top 16 Counter Stike teams from around the world competing for a total prize pool of $250,000. The first 8 teams from the last major in Cologne were joined by another 8, who qualified at the DreamHack Open in Stockholm, in a “group stage into single elimination” competition.
As the first two days of the event come to an end, so does the group stage and I’m hoping to share with you a short recap of what happened on the main stage and around the booths in these first two days. First off, the highlight of the first day was definitely the Luminosity vs. Fnatic game. The Brazilian team managed to beat Fnatic 16-13, in what is up until now the upset of the tournament. This is, in the most part, thanks to FalleN’s brilliant plays, arguably the MVP of Luminosity. As far as the second day goes, the highlight has to be NiP’s game versus Titan. The guys at Ninjas in Pyjamas managed to beat Titan in a best of 3 after making a solid comeback in the first game and then dominating in the second one. After being led 9-6 at half-time, NiP manages to beat Titan 16-14 on Cache, Titan’s map pick. They then go on to completely trample Titan on Dust 2 with a swift 16-1 victory, securing themselves a spot in the quarterfinals.
As far as events around the various booths present at DreamHack go, a couple spring to mind. The first one is the story of a 12-year-old boy (whose name I wasn’t fortunate enough to get) that won prizes at most of the competitions organized by the various booths set up at DreamHack. Regardless of his name, I’ve heard of his “legend” a lot during this second day. The second noticeable event comes from Intel’s booth in the form of Team Property. Intel was promoting a CS:GO team they are sponsoring, called Team Property, by organizing a few pro-player vs general public matches at their booth. The Swedish team obviously dominated all the games, managing to win the first two games without losing a single round… oh, also, did I mention Team Property consists of female players only? Yes, there was a lot of ego-braking going on at the Intel booth. Regardless, it is nice to see efforts being made to bring a greater female presence onto the eSports scene.
This is about it for the first two days of DreamHack Cluj-Napoca. The brackets are all set for the following days and they look this: EnVyUs vs Fnatic, Virtus.pro vs Gamers2, Team SoloMid vs Ninjas in Pyjamas and last but not least Luminosity vs Natus Vincere. Stay tuned for the recaps of the last two days at DreamHack.
