We now know which team will represent North America at one of Counter-Strike’s most prestigious international tournaments. But Team Liquid’s qualification for the Micro-Star International Electronic Sports World Cup didn’t happen without a fair amount of controversy, as one of its opponents was knocked out by a DDoS attack.
Team Liquid defeated Cloud9 last night in a showdown of epic proportions. On the back of strong performances by Jonathan “EliGE” Jablonowski and Jacob “Fugly” Medina, the team took a 2-1 victory with success on maps Train and Cache.
Unfortunately for Cloud9, entry-fragger Ryan “freakazoid” Abadir was plagued by Internet issues, resulting from an apparent distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack targeting his home Internet. The problems began to occur in the final match of the series, which was played on Cache, causing Abadir to disconnect after the pistol round.
In his place, Cloud9 brought in manager Tres “stunna” Saranthas, only to swap him out with affNity rifleman David “Davey” Stafford shortly before halftime. Without Abadir, found itself facing a major deficit before nearly bouncing back. The final score of the map resulted in a 16-13 victory for Team Liquid.
The last time the two North American giants faced off, the victory went to Cloud9 in a 16-13 showing on Overpass in the ESEA and ESL Pro League on May 5. Medina also showed to be the strongest member of the Liquid squad in that series, but Cloud9 still came out on top thanks to an impressive performance by Abadir and teammate Tyler “Skadoodle” Latham.
At the Electronic Sports World Cup, Liquid will be facing the likes of Brazilian squad Keyd Stars and Oceania’s Voxeminor. As for their European counterpart, the seed is currently undecided as CSGames.pl will run an offline qualification tournament from June 19 to 21. Pre-selected teams include Polish squads Virtus.Pro and Gamers2, as well as Germany’s Penta eSports and Spain’s x6tence. The final two seeds for the offline qualification tournament will be determined through a round of online qualifiers that will run June 4 to 15.
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