Liquid registers its first tournament win at CS_Summit 2

By
Pranav Nalawade
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The second installment of Beyond The Summit’s international Counter-Strike Global Offensive event concluded with Liquid Gaming taking home their first championship title as a team.

On their road to the championship, Liquid blew out SK Gaming in the Loser Finals and Cloud9 in the Grand finals on Train Mirage and Overpass with 19-17, 16-8 and 16-10 scorelines. Keith “NAF” Markovic totaled 94 kills in the grand finals with an ADR of 89.0 split between the 4 maps.

The finals began with a bo5 series in which Train, Mirage, and Overpass were played with C9 being given a 1-0 map advantage because of their successful run through the winner’s bracket.

Surprisingly, C9 dropped Train to liquid gaming 19-17. On Mirage, a strong Terrorist side from C9 gave them the early lead. However, Liquid set up a strong defense for the rest of the half, which ended in a surprisingly close 9-6 scoreline in favor of steel’s side. Liquid won the pistol round with an A executing with an amazing 1v2 clutch by Keith “NAF” Markovic. Liquid won the second map with a scoreline of 16-8 by taking lead in the series, but they lost Cache 16-11 because of C9’s overwhelming CT side. C9’s “Stewie2k” Yip sat atop the server at 25 kills and an insane Deagle collateral triple kill during an early force buy. In the last map of the series, newcomer Keith “NAF” Markovic led his lineup at 29 frags to close out the series on Overpass 16-10.

This victory at the cs_summit 2 secured $63,750 for Liquid, as well as their first tournament win and second consecutive North American squad to win an international tournament in 2018.

CS_SUMMIT 2 final standings:

  1. [flag country=”us”] Liquid – $63,750
  2. [flag country=”us”] Cloud9 – $33,750
  3. [flag country=”br”] SK – $19,500
  4. [flag country=”dk”] Heroic – $15,000
  5. [flag country=”us”] Torqued – $5,250
  6. [flag country=”dk”] North – $5,250
  7. [flag country=”ru”] Vega Squadron – $3,750
  8. [flag country=”se”] NiP – $3,750

Keith “NAF” Markovic was named MVP of the tournament by HLTV considering his consistent gameplay in the grand finals and throughout the tournament.

Incidentally, this is the second time the 20-year-old has been awarded the Most Valuable Player of the tournament title. NAF ended the tournament with an average 1.23 rating, second only to Valdemar “valde” Bjørn Vangså’s 1.31, and was in the top five in 13 other categories, leading in KDD (+50), percentage of rounds with at least one kill (52.7%), clutches (6) and opening frags (46).