What happened during the StarSeries S.3 Finals?

Last week-end were played the Finals for the Season 3 of the i-League StarSeries, with not less than 16 of the best Counter-Strike: Global Offensive teams in the world.
Starladder’s choice for this season has been to go with the Swiss-like system already used in the ESL One: New York in 2016. With double the teams for double the fun, 8 invited teams were to fight 8 qualified teams during the Group Stage.

Tournament & Teams

Invited Europe Qualifier China Qualifier America Qualifier
astralis ninjasinpyjamas fnatic mvpproject immortals
fazeclan north g2esports uya counterlogicgaming
gambitgaming skgaming tyloo hellraisers
natusvincere virtuspro Click on an icon to see the matches from that team in the Group Stage.
All matches have detailed results and replays available !

8 teams qualified from the Group Stage for the Playoffs, and are, in order:

  1. (3-0 score) G2 Esports & Natus Vincere
  2. (3-1 score) North, Astralis & HellRaisers
  3. (3-2 score) Fnatic, CounterLogic Gaming & FaZe Clan

The finalists were then seeded into the Finals bracket depending on their Group Stage ranking, and well let you have a general look before going further into what happened:

FaZe Clan, which barely managed to qualify from the Group Stage, with the #8th rank, finally overcame the challenge and won the trophy, against all odds. Other teams with impressive results were HellRaisers and CLG, which were not expected to perform as well as they did.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, both Brazilian squads, SK Gaming and Immortals have been under-performing during this event, and so was Virtus.pro.

Maps Stats

All 7 maps from the Active Duty Pool have been played during the tournament, but some teams clearly had a bias towards their favorite ones, and as such, some maps have been much more played than others.
Here is the detail of the maps and who were the best teams and players performing on each:

Map Times played Win Rate
(CT / T)		 Top Team Top Player
inferno 11 45%/55% fnatic GuardiaN
slovakia – natusvincere
mirage 10 43.2%/56.8% skgaming s1mple
ukraine – natusvincere
cbble 8 45.3%/54.7% g2esports shox
france – natusvincere
train 6 63.7%/36.3% fnatic KRiMZ
sweden – natusvincere
cache 6 51.5%/48.5% hellraisers AdreN
kazakhstan – gambitgaming
overpass 6 60.9%/39.1% g2esports shox
france – g2esports
nuke 4 58.3%/41.7% ninjasinpyjamas Xizt
sweden – ninjasinpyjamas

VOD Selection

Even though the whole competition is pretty much a must-see for any and all CS:GO fans, if you do not have time to catch up on every single match, we did a selection for you, so you would not miss the best moments of this historic tournament. Those are maybe not the highest-level games, but the ones you don’t want to miss:

Stage Teams Maps Link
Group Stage
Round 1
(bo1)		 hellraisers – fazeclan cache Replay
Group Stage
Round 2
(bo1)		 north – astralis inferno Replay
Group Stage
Round 3
(bo1)		 natusvincere – north inferno Replay
Group Stage
Round 4
(bo1)		 counterlogicgaming – gambitgaming cobblestone Replay
Group Stage
Round 5
(bo1)		 counterlogicgaming – immortals cache Replay
Playoffs
QuarterFinals
(bo3)		 north – hellraisers cobblestonecacheoverpass Replay
Playoffs
SemiFinals
(bo3)		 fazeclan – hellraisers miragetrain Replay
Playoffs
Grand Finals
(bo3)		 astralis – fazeclan miragenukeinferno Replay
In case you only really have 3 minutes, here is the aL’s FragMovie, with the very best actions from the tournament. Bonus

We hope you enjoyed this tournament and were able to make up for anything you’d have missed during the week-end!
See you next time for another epic esports tournament!