Over the weekend our Team Fotress 2 team took part in a four team invitational hosted at Dreamhack Winter 2015 which featured the best teams from Europe. Off the back of our ETF2L Season 22 win we were looking to put up a strong showing at this event. The tournament was a double elimination knockout with a $4,000 prizepool put forward by Marketplace.tf.
It is no secret that every team at this event deserved to be there and all had a chance of making it through to the finals, which soon became apparent during the course of our best-of-3 against Publiclir.se. We got off to a slow start in map 1 – Snakewater, not conceding any points but caught in a deadlock until around the 15 minute mark, where we scored our first point and the floodgates opened. After that first point we soon racked up another 4 taking the first map 5-0.
After a dominant first map we moved on to Process which was our map choice. Publiclir.se proved that the 5-0 scoreline of the last map wasn’t going to repeat itself as they took a firm lead early on. Fighting from behind we managed to get a couple of points on the board, but time soon ran out for us and we conceded Process 4-2 taking this best-of-3 to its third and final map, Badlands.
The deciding map, Badlands, was a map we had put a lot of time into before the event which, became apparent as we burst into the lead early on. Publiclir.se didn’t go down without a fight and clawed back some points, but the lead was too great and we secured Badlands and the best-of-3, 5-2; 2-1 in maps and moving us forwards to the upper bracket finals.
Day two rolled around and we were to face the former Epsilon TF2 team, now called SwedeRage. This game was the clash of the titans everyone was hoping to see, arguably the two top teams of Europe. The first map was Badlands, a map we had excelled on the day before and today wasn’t going to be any different. We took 3 points and only conceded one before the time ran out, successfully defending our point from some near misses and securing map one.
Next up was Process, a map which didn’t go our way on day one and SwedeRage were hoping to even the scoreline pushing the game to a third map. However we took a firm lead in this map and showed no sign of letting up ending the map 7-2 and taking our first 2-0 victory of the event and making our way into the grand final.
SwedeRage successfully defeated Publiclir.se in the lower bracket finals meaning that we were going to go up against them again in the grand finals of the Dreamhack Winter 2015 Team Fortress 2 Invitational. Much like our meeting earlier in the day we didn’t give SwedeRage any room to gain a lead and took the finals in 3 straight maps.
Final Standings:
1st – Reason Gaming – $1,750
2nd – SwedeRage – $1,000
3rd – Publiclir.se – $750
4th – LEGO – $500
