Vitality Cling On After Eliminating Evil Geniuses

Vitality will fight another day after beating Evil Geniuses 2-1 and moving to the 1-2 pool of the Legends Stage. Rémy “⁠XTQZZZ⁠” Quoniam‘s team now need to win two more best-of-three matches if they are to make the knockout stage after dropping games to Entropiq and Virtus.pro on Saturday.

Evil Geniuses failed to register a win at the PGL Major Stockholm Major after going 0-3 in the groups with only a map to their name. This is the culmination of several months of underperformance for the North American squad.

apEX performed consistently across the series

A solid 10-5 half for Vitality on Inferno turned for the worse as Evil Geniuses kickstarted an unexpected comeback after switching to the CT side, stopping the Frenchmen on their tracks and stealing the map 16-13. Vincent “⁠Brehze⁠” Cayonte was the x-factor for his team, ending the game with a 24-12 K-D and a 1.41 rating.

Vitality responded with a statement victory on Vertigo as apEX‘s squad won 13 rounds in a row to secure a 16-5 victory despite Owen “⁠oBo⁠” Schlatter‘s best efforts. The Frenchmen could count on Mathieu “⁠ZywOo⁠” Herbaut who turned up to play after a slow start on Inferno, and Jayson “⁠Kyojin⁠” Nguyen Van who once again displayed his proficiency on Vertigo.

Evil Geniuses conceded a 5-10 lead to the opposition for the second time this series on Dust2 but there was no comeback this time. Michał “⁠MICHU⁠” Müller and Brehze played an exceptional CT side, making life difficult for Vitality‘s offense but the deficit was too much to overcome. The Frenchmen closed the map 16-12, taking the series 2-1 and sending Evil Geniuses home.