The first day of the group stage of the BLAST Fall Groups 2024 tournament brought us four exciting matches, in which the favorites were victorious.
The honor of opening BLAST Fall went to Team Spirit and OG, and as expected, Spirit took a convincing victory against the new OG line-up. Young Danil "donk" Kryshkovets was convincing with 37 frags, 104.7 damage per round and a 1.58 rating, followed closely by AWP player Dmitry "sh1ro" Sokolov with one less frag and a 1.56 rating.
OG tried to surprise Spirit with Dust2, but they were unable to break through the solid defense of the Russian team, who took a 10-2 lead on the CT side and then routinely cruised to a 13-3 victory in the follow-up. Then followed Mirage where OG was more specific, they were only two rounds behind at halftime, but they failed to get a turnaround and Spirit deservedly won 3-9.
The biggest surprise of the first day was the result of the second match of Group A, in which Heroic defeated Complexity 2-0 even though they were forced to play with the coach. Namely, Abdul "degster" Gasanov had to miss another tournament due to visa problems, which is starting to cause huge problems for the team, and Eeta "sAw" Saha had to play instead.
And while the teams were tied at the start of the first Ancient map, Heroic took a 13-8 victory with a 7-2 series on the CT side and took a 1-0 lead in the series, and on Vertigo we watched overtime after which Heroic put an end to the match 16- 14 result.
In group B we saw Vitality who continues to struggle and has trouble finding optimal form. They lost Anubis 10-13 against the new GamerLegion five, on the Mirage map they managed to recover and equalize with a 19-17 victory, but only after two overtimes and a fierce fight. To forcefully open the map on Dust2, take a 10-2 lead and then maintain the advantage until the final 13-5.
Astralis beat Falcons 2-0 (13-7 Dust2, 13-9 Ancient) without major problems and now they have a big challenge in front of them in the form of a derby with Vitality where they will fight for a place in the playoffs.
Today's schedule of matches:
12:00 Team Spirit - Heroic
14:30 OG - Complexity
17:00 Team Vitality - Astralis
19:30 GamerLegion - Falcons