ESL One Belo Horizonte was the first tournament from the ESL One franchise that was hosted in Brazil. Despite the fact that SK played in this tournament, Mineirinho Arena was half empty which is odd for the tournament of this caliber. On the other side, the tournament was very popular on Twitch and YouTube garnering a total of 2,232,482 views.

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ESL One Belo Horizonte 2018 – Tournament info 

Dates: 2018.06.13 – 2018.06.17

Location & Venue: Brazil Belo Horizonte, Mineirinho Arena

Organizer: ESL

Official sponsors: Intel, Alienware, DHL, Betway, Logitech G, Paysafecard, NEEDforSEAT

Tournament type: Offline, LAN

Number of teams: 8

Total prize pool: $200,000 USD

ESL One Belo Horizonte 2018 – Tournament format  

Group Stage:

June 13th – 15th, 2018

Two double-elimination format (GSL) Groups

Each group had  4 teams

The group stage was seeded based on the ESL CS:GO World Rankings

All matches were Bo3

The top two teams from each group advanced to the Playoffs

Playoffs:

June 16th – 17th, 2018

Single-Elimination bracket

The Semifinals were Bo3

The Grand Final was Bo5

Belo Horizonte 2018 Semi Final Layout

ESL One Belo Horizonte 2018 – Betting & odds

Due to groups based on the ESL CS:GO World Rankings we got 4 favourites against 4 underdogs in the first round.

Belo Horizonte 2018 betting odds courtesy GG.bet

In the picture above you can see odds provided by GG.Bet

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ESL One Belo Horizonte 2018 – Tournament flow

Group stage

A total of 8 teams were divided into 2 groups. One team from each group advanced directly to the playoffs with 2 wins while other teams had to play a decider Bo3 match to advance as the second placed team in the playoffs.

ESL One Belo Horizonte 2018 Group Stage – Teams and Matches

Faze and Mouse didn’t lose a single map in the group stage. SK finished second place in group A, they did lose to Space Soldiers and as a result had to play against Space Soldiers once again in a decider match,  which they won with the help of the home crowd.

In group B things were different. Team Liquid was lucky once again, they advanced to the playoffs with two wins against the same team after losing to the best team in the group. During the previous ECS Season 5 Finals tournament, they did the same thing by losing to Astralis and defeating Fnatic 2 times. This time around they lost to Mousesports and went on to defeat team BIG, twice. Out of the last five tournaments, Liquid finished four times in the top three, by managing to avoid playing the best teams right to the very end.

Playoffs

The playoffs matches were more interesting. The first team from each group were pit against the second placed team from the other group.

ESL One Belo Horizonte 2018 Playoffs

Mousesports had no problem defeating SK on the home ground. They won 2 maps with handicap rounds (16-7 on Dust 2 and 16-12 on The Train).

On the other side, FaZe Clan had some problems with Team Liquid. Faze also won 2 maps with handicap but then lost on Dust 2 (Nuke 16 -3, Dust 2 14-16, Mirage 16-7). The main reason for that loss was a gap in their roster. They played without olofmeister, with croman as a stand-in. Croman did some good frags but his communication and understating was not so good with the team. The main reason for this was that he was new and needed to adjust to Faze’s gameplay style, which he couldn’t.

The Grand Finals

This match was one of the most interesting matches of this years’ ESL One Belo Horizonte. The match was a best of 5 series. Faze won on the first map Inferno (mouse’s pick) 16-6 and had a 11-0 lead on the Cache. Everyone thought this match was over as Faze won the first map that was mouse’s pick and had a 11-0 lead in the second map. This is when things got interesting. Mouse had a magnificent comeback and managed to win that map without any overtimes (16-14).

The third map was The Train and mouse took it 16-12 and they needed only one more map to win at this tournament. Everything was at stake for Faze, their chance to triumph at this tournament as well as the third win on ESL tournament for their Intel Grand Slam record.

The fourth map was FaZe’s pick, the Mirage, which they won 16-9 with minimum fuss. The problem came in the decider map – Dust 2. Faze had already lost on Dust 2 to Liquid, and having played on it only thrice before they didn’t have enough time to practice any strategies for it.

With the odds stacked against Faze, mouse forgot about NiKo, an ace CS:GO player FaZe had up it’s sleeve. With around 30 kills on Dust 2 and 118 in total during the Grand Finals, NiKo helped FaZe win the decider 16-10! With this FaZe added another win to their Intel Grand Slam record and were just 1 tournament away from the $1,000,000 USD grand prize!

NiKo was later named the player of the match as well as the MVP player of this tournament and rightly so.

Belo Horizonte 2018 MVP Player of the tournament – NiKo