In the first semi-final of the ESL Pro League, we will watch the Ukrainian derby, after Natus Vincere and Monte triumphed in the first quarter-final matches.
Just 3 days of #ESLProLeague Season 18 remain ????
— ESL Counter-Strike (@ESLCS) September 28, 2023
After today's Quarter-Finals check out the bracket below! ⤵️ pic.twitter.com/bDq0X8ujRH
The killer duo Sergiy "DeQQ" Demchenko and Alexander "br0" With a total of 105 frags on two maps, Bro brought a huge celebration to the fans of the Monte team who managed to defeat one of the main favorites of the tournament and along the way stopped the impressive streak of 17 consecutive victories of the Vitality team on the Nuke map.
The first quarter-final of the 18th season of the ESL Pro League started on Anubis, the pick of the Ukrainian team. Monte decided to take Inferno out of the game in the first series of bans, and Vitality used that to pick Nuke, where they counted on continuing their streak of success. The deciding map was supposed to be Mirage, but in the end we didn't even get to it.
Monte took an 11-4 lead with great aggressive play on the T side of Anubis, a map marked by the brilliant DemQQ with 30 frags and 107.6štete per round with a 1.67 rating. It was this player that prevented Vitality from making a complete turnaround after š they took seven out of eight rounds at the start of the second half of the game, and with a total score of 16-11 Monte took a 1-0 lead in the match.
Nuke started with the better of Vitality, but Monte was able to take control and take the lead, only for Vitality to close the gap to 6-9 by the end of the first half. Nuke went into an extremely uncertain ending, but with the score 14-13 for Vitality, the Ukrainian team managed to stop the bleeding and stabilize, tying three crucial rounds for a big 16-14 victory.
Eternal Fire drew huge attention from the crowd with a string of wins against teams like Cloud9, Team Liquid, Astralis and BIG. They entered the match against Na'Vi as outsiders, but they have demonstrated several times so far that leaving the role of favorite to the opponent does not have to mean anything.
However, this time they failed to surprise the moody opponent, in whose ranks Aleksandr "s1mple" Kostyliev with 43 frags, while on the other hand Ismailcan "XANTARES" Dortkardes completely neutralized with only 26 shots during the whole match.
Na'Vi conceded only seven rounds to their opponents at their peak - Anubis, where they easily maintained a 10-5 advantage from the T side and turned it into a victory. We saw a similar scenario on Nuke where Na&Vi took the lead with an identical score in the first part of the game, this time Eternal Fire managed to reach a double-digit number of rounds in the continuation, but they could not do more than that to reduce the defeat to 10- 16.
In the remaining quarter-final matches on Friday, ENCE and Movistar Riders meet (15:30) and G2 Esports and MOUZ (19:00), both matches can be watched live on the Arena Esports TV channel.
