Team Envy faced no trouble in their ESL One Rio North American open qualifier campaign and advanced to the closed qualifier phase of the first CS:GO Major tournament without losing a map.
Envy were too much for the NA open qualifier
It was pretty obvious that Envy have a little bit too much firepower for the teams in this open qualifier to be able to contend. The Noah “Nifty” Francis-led squad consecutively beat Gaming Stadium, GameAgents, Asuna’s Anime Aimers and Faint on the road to qualifying for the closed section of proceedings. AAA almost made it a game in the semi-final but Envy still held the lead from the first round to the last for a 16-12 win. The Anime Aimers’ 12-round production was matched by Faint in the Bo3 decider against Envy. The minor difference being that Faint accumulated those within two maps in the 16-4; 16-8 loss.
The story was much the same in the other Bo3 game where Infinity couldn’t even break into double digits versus Rugratz and finished with nine total rounds on Inferno and Nuke – 16-6; 16-3. Rugratz were impressive throughout this qualifier with their toughest opponent being RGB in the Round of 32 – a match they won 16-6.
The South American open qualifier
Open qualifications for ESL One Rio were also played on the other side of America. In what was essentially a small-scale Brazillian championship with all eight quarterfinalists hailing from Brazil, it was W7M and paiN who came out on top, taking down RED Canids and Imperial, respectively.
The ESL One Rio qualifier schedule
Three more ESL One Rio open qualifiers will be played in North America and one more in South America. The last one in NA will take place on February 12-13. The second qualifier in SA is right after – on February 14-15. The closed qualifiers schedule is reversed, with the South American one commencing on March 3 and finishing on March 5, and the North American one taking place on March 6-8.
