Gambit advance to Masters finals with 13-0 destruction of G2

It was an incredibly dominant victory for Gambit today. With their 2-0 victory over EMEA rivals G2, including a 13-0 Icebox map that left G2 utterly humiliated, they've advanced to the Berlin grand finals. They'll play the winner of Envy-100 Thieves.

Heading into map select, we got our first sign that Gambit had come into this very prepared. Instead of picking a more familiar map, they went with a pocket Breeze pick. This map, the newest one that's available in competitive play, has been by far the least-picked map of the event. But Gambit soon showed that they knew what they were doing.

The map began solidly back-and-forth. Cista "keloqz" Wassim showed up in a big way for G2 towards the beginning of this map. However, slowly but surely, Gambit began to pull away. They grabbed the lead midway through the first half and didn't look back as they secured a solid 13-10 win.

The next map was Icebox. This was G2's pick, and a map they'd done well on all tournament. For Gambit, it was solid as well, but they'd shown shakiness. It was here that they gave up 10 straight rounds against 100 Thieves in group play. However, what seemed promising on paper would turn into disaster.

There's simply no other way to put this, than to say it was absolute destruction. G2 never looked in it, and Gambit were ahead of them at every step. Ayaz "nAts" Akhmetshin put up a performance worthy of his star status, constantly disrupting G2 on the lurk.

"Yeah, Icebox was probably one of our strongest maps coming in to this," G2's coach Neil "neilzinho" Finlay said after the loss. "We decided to change to Reyna instead of Raze. Honestly I don't think that's what was probably contributing to the score, but I just think the way we played today was nowhere near our performance, and I don't think one agent change made that much of a difference. We lost a lot of crucial rounds, and the Reyna was basically just to counter how they played, but we got punished, we lost some stupid rounds, and that's kinda what happened. We got snowballed."

"We thought we could leave Icebox against them," Gambit IGL Igor "Redgar" Vlasov said after the match. "We just prepared it, that's why, I guess, we fought well versus them."

"You don't get 13-0d if you're playing at your normal level," G2's Oscar "mixwell" Cañellas Colocho added in their press conference. "We were playing not at our level, and they were playing at their best level."

This marks the first ever 13-0 at a major international VALORANT tournament - neither Masters Reykjavik, nor Berlin (until this point) have seen a performance like this. Gambit will go down in the VALORANT history books - now all that remains is to finish the job tomorrow.

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