BESL Pro Season 2 finals are going to kick off on the 20th of October at Saku Suurhall arena in Tallinn, Estonia. The event is hosted as part of the HyperTown Tallinn Urban & eSports festival. Tickets can be found here!

The culmination of €9,000 CS:GO competition is going to feature the four best teams from the online stage. These teams are going to be placed in a single elimination bracket, with all the games being played as a best-of-three series.

The winner of the event is not only going to be crowned as the best team in Baltic states, taking home the beautiful BESL Pro Season 2 champions trophy, but will also receive the lion share of the prize pool in form of €2,200!

As we’re still waiting for the event itself to come along, let’s take a closer look at the teams that made it to the finals this time around and get to know them a little bit better!

Note: as of 5th of October, the team previously known as WASD Sports has parted ways with the organisation and has now joined XGR eSports for the time period of the current BESL Pro season. With that change, the former XGR eSports team is now known as XGR-X. Also - a few days later, a similar change happened to the other Estonian LAN finalist namely AUTOCLUTCH, who have now re-joined forces with their previous organisation WORTEX.

WORTEX

Finishing off our ‘A look at the finalist’ series is WORTEX - the second Estonian team, who secured themselves a spot in the finals by completing their regular season run with a 11-4 win-loss record. The only four games they dropped this season were to MightyWolves (14:16 mirage), Žalgiris (7:16 inferno), XGR eSports (5:16 overpass) and wolsung (4:16 mirage).

In order to understand how exactly did zteeek and his colleagues did it for the second season in a row, our head admin Gekons sat down to have a chat with him!

Gekons: Congratulation on qualifying to the LAN finals for the second season in a row! A realistic question in that regard - it’s obvious that all the teams here wanted to qualify for the finals, but how doable did this goal feel for you guys at the start of the season? Did you feel confident that you’re going to qualify again or were you doubtful about it knowing how hard the competition for the top 4 here is?

zteeek: Thanks! We definitely knew that we had a high chance of qualifying again, but we also were aware that it won’t come lightly. Getting to the top 4 was always our main goal all throughout the season and anything below that wasn’t going to satisfy us.

 

Gekons: If we look back at the time you guys qualified for the season 1 finals, I remember that you put out a tweet saying that this is your last event as a team and you’re going your separate ways after that. Fast forward to now and you guys are still playing together while qualifying for the finals again. Tell us - what exactly happened during the off-season? What made you guys stick together and keep on playing as a group?

zteeek: Okay, first of all - me, DoisTa and PhilEba have been playing together for almost two years now, it’s not that easy to tear us apart just like that. With that being said, after Season 1 LAN finals we did have some internal issues within the team, so we decided to take a break during summer and not play any leagues or qualifiers together. Weirdly enough, that seemed to help us a lot as now we don’t have any problems when we’re playing together. When we realized that BESL Season 2 is right around the corner, we decided to keep our 3-man core as we all have a very similar playstyle and we work really well together in-game. It all just happened naturally!

 

Gekons: The start of the season was a poor one for you guys as you began the competition with suffering two defeats in your week 1 games against MightyWolves (14:16 mirage) and Žalgiris (7:16 inferno). How hard was it to kick off the season like this knowing that you guys were one of the four finalists last time around? Can you tell us about the atmosphere in the team at that time?

zteeek: Honestly, the two losses against Mightywolves and Žalgiris didn't have that much of an impact on us. We just knew that we made silly, crucial mistakes that ultimately lost us these games. The only thing these defeats did was put some extra pressure on us, since we knew that going forwards we have to perform and we can’t afford to lose more games. Overall, I would say that the team atmosphere stayed the same.

 

Gekons: Going forwards, starting from week 2 you guys picked up your game and from that point onwards you only lost two more games to two of the best teams in the league - XGR eSports (5:16 overpass) and wolsung (4:16 mirage). How did you manage to turn things around so quickly? Did you guys make any changes to how you approached the game or was it just you starting to click as a team?

zteeek: Coming into this season, we brought in Sickta & cheti who both were experienced players and they brought a lot of leadership to the team. They had a completely different approach to the game, which was really strange for us at first, but as the time went by, we just got used to it and things started to click. We made some much needed adjustments in the game by talking things over and we started winning games.

 

Gekons: The last game of the season you had was against 1337HUANIA. At the time, this game meant nothing for you as you had already secured a spot in the final four, while for 1337HUANIA a regulation time victory in this game would’ve given them the #1 seed, which they really wanted. As we now know - you guys denied them this perk by taking the game to overtime and even winning it in the end. Can you walk us through of what happened that game and how did you manage to beat them?

zteeek: Yes, this game, on paper, didn’t mean anything to us since we were already confirmed at the LAN finals, but we still wanted to have a good showing here in order to gain confidence for the real event. Our T side was great with Sickta calling and reading 1337HUANIA like a book. We all hit our shots and played some amazing CS. When we swapped over to the CT side, though, we started to crumble like we always do. While we were trying to figure out how to play CT side properly, they had already brought game back to an overtime. At that point, we weren’t really tilted, we were just a little bit disappointed, because we felt like we could’ve ended the match long time ago. In the end, we kept calm, stayed focused and came out with the victory.

 

Gekons: In the finals you’ve been chosen by XGR eSports, the 1st place finisher from the regular season, as their opponents for the semi-final game, while 1337HUANIA were left to face off against wolsung. As previously mentioned, during your regular season game against them you suffered a crushing defeat on overpass 5:16. With that in mind - are you guys putting in any special kind of preparation for this game in order to avoid being demolished like that again?

zteeek: We will definitely look at what maps they like to play and how they play out specific situations, but not much more than that. We just want to go into the match with confidence and play our own game. I know that we can beat them if we play correctly and it’s going to be one hell of a match if we do so.

 

Gekons: As mentioned above, the other semi-final is going to happen between 1337HUANIA and wolsung. What are your thoughts on this match-up? Who do you think is going to win and who would you like to face if you win your semi-final game against XGR eSports?

Zteeek: If we were to win against XGR eSports, I would like to face 1337HUANIA in the grand final. I feel like we have a better chance of winning against them than we have against wolsung, just based off of the results we have had against these teams. We’re definitely more confident playing against Lithuanians rather than the Latvian powerhouse.

 

Gekons: Thanks for your time Kevin! Do you have any final words or shoutouts you want to give?

zteeek: Big thanks to everyone who watched and supported us during the regular season. I hope a lot of you guys are coming to HyperTown Tallinn to witness some epic CS live! Big shoutout to WORTEX for taking us aboard once again and also check out all of our players’ social media (twitter, twitch etc).

Stay tuned as even though the regular season has come to an end, our news section is still going to be filled with interesting content such as interviews with the teams that made it to the finals and the big LAN finals preview article to let you guys know what to expect from the matches happening at HyperTown Tallinn Urban & eSports festival!

News article by: Bruno ‘Gekons’ Gailītis