by Fnatic have won their first match of the 2022 Pinnacle Cup Championship, defeating Heroic 16-14 in a closely contested best-of-one bout on Wednesday.
This marks the first of a four-day tournament featuring eight Counter-Strike teams from around the world. The LAN event is currently being played at Sparbanken Skane Arena in Lund, Sweden.
Day 1 hosted six fixtures, with the Fnatic-Heroic game being the most closely contested. However, two teams – MiBR and Evil Geniuses – have already been eliminated from the tournament.
The opening fixture was played on Inferno, as both teams rejected the other maps. It was impressive to see the newly put together Fnatic win against the No.9 ranked team in the world.
Coming into the game, no one expected Fnatic to walk away with a victory. Several esports betting sites had Heroic pegged as -370.37 favourites, suggesting an 82% probability of victory.
Three of Fnatic’s starters joined the team days before the start of the tournament. The British team announced the acquisition of Fredrik “roeJ” J?rgensen and Nico “nicoodoz” Tamjid on June 3. Both players came from Copenhagen Flames.
Their most recent acquisition is Patrik “f0rest” Lindberg, who is on loan from Dignitas. The organization announced his acquisition a day before the tournament, and he will be operating as a stand-in.
Fnatic are currently undergoing a roster revamp but were unable to put their house in order before the Pinnacle Cup. They reached out to f0rest after their first-choice fell ill at boot camp.
F0rest, who was a member of Fnatic from 2006 to 2010, fit in well with the new roster. Although he was tied for the most deaths in the match, he registered a decent 18 kills.
Nicoodoz was the team’s best player, posting a 20-14 K-D and finishing with a game-high 1.21 rating.
The biggest surprise of the night was Fnatic choosing William “mezii” Merriman to be the in-game leader. The Englishman had never taken up the role in the past but did a decent job executing today.
In the post-match interview with HLTV, mezii said they were able to pull off such an upset because they communicated well.
“Really good to be honest, I think Heroic are always one of the hardest teams to play, just their playstyle is super hard to read against because they’re always gambling, they’re always over-rotating, so it’s super hard,” he said.
“For us, since we made the changes, it has always been about communication. I think when you play a team like that, when your communication is really good, that’s how you beat them. I think we played super calm and were able to react well against them.”
It will be intriguing to see how this team progresses in the tournament. Not many had big expectations for them because of how they were put together.
Fortunately, they have managed to pull off one of the biggest wins in the tournament.
Fnatic will return to action on June 9 to take on BIG in the winners’ match. As things stand, a playoff appearance is guaranteed, but they will be looking for better seeding.
A win against BIG will catapult them into the upper-bracket final. If they fail to win that best-of-three series, they will square off against Heroic again in the decider match.
The winner of that fixture will get a direct seeding to the lower-bracket final, while the loser will play in the first round of the lower bracket.
Regardless of where they end up, they still have a chance to win first place and walk away with $150,000 of the US$250,000 prize pool.
