The first round of the play-in phase of IEM Katowice 2024 was marked by a great Danish derby in which Heroic outplayed the favored Astralis, and the biggest surprise came from home Rebels Gaming, who defeated one of the most famous names in play-in, the Cloud9 team.
The first eight matches of this year's edition of the IEM Katowice CS Spectacle gave us a first glimpse of what we can all expect at this tournament.
Heroic and Astralis played a match on the Mirage map, and thanks to the excellent defense on the CT side in the second half, Heroic managed to make up for the 5-7 deficit and achieve a 13-11 victory.
Rebels won against C9 on the same map. In the first part of the game, both teams took six runs, but Rebels Gaming was better on the T side and with a 13-10 victory, they achieved a huge success.
Eternal Fire also surprised, outclassing one of the top ranked teams before the stage, BetBoom, 13-11 on Nuke. BB players simply couldn't get anything going, and it's really surprising that they suffered a convincing defeat playing first on the favored CT side of the map.
BIG prevented the home fans from celebrating twice with a 13-9 win against ENCE, who made their debut at the big tournament with a new line-up.
The MongolZ managed to surprise FURIU and win 16-14 after the first and only overtime at the start of play, and GamerLegion managed to defeat M80 after a lot of struggle with a score of 13-10.
Finally we saw the dominance of the Russian teams, Virtus.pro defeated Rooster 13-4, and Team Spirit played a perfect 13-0 game against Apex, with an incredible release from Danil "donk" Krshkovets who made 18 frags in 13 rounds, with a 133.8 damage per round and a 2.24 rating.
The second round pairings are:
1-0 teams
Rebels Gaming - Eternal Fire (0-2)
Heroic - BIG
The MongolZ - Team Spirit
GamerLegion - Virtus.pro
0-1 teams
Cloud9 - BetBoom Team
Astralis - ENCE
FURIA Esports - Apex
M80 - Rooster
