NAVI open BLAST Premier Fall Group C with a victory

The CIS squad's 2-1 victory over OG means they have won eight of their last nine series.

Natus Vincere continued where they left off after their recent ESL Pro League win, comfortably besting OG on Overpass and Mirage. Aleksi "⁠Aleksib⁠" Virolainen and co. managed to pick up the second map, Dust2, but at no point looked like they would take the series win.

The series started with OG's pick of Overpass, and the boys in blue got themselves off to a rough start; Natus Vincere came into their CT side ready to play and quickly rattled off six rounds with minimal resistance before OG even managed to get in the board.

Kirill "⁠Boombl4⁠" Mikhailov seemed to have the right read every single round with OG finding themselves walking into stack after stack, and they were fortunate to scramble together a couple of rounds at the end of the half to make it 4-11, giving themselves some semblance of hope for the second half.

Unfortunately any hope they had was quickly crushed as OG lost the pistol round, and Natus Vincere won five on the bounce to quickly end the first map. Valeriy "⁠b1t⁠" Vakhovskiy in particular stood out for Natus Vincere, with his aggressive approach to holding A on the CT side, often on his own, paying dividends for the CIS squad.

That brought us to the pick of Natus Vincere, Dust2, and it was a more hotly contested battle than the first map. Natus Vincere started on T side, winning the pistol and converting, but OG immediately pegged them back with three of their own. The rest of the half was just as close, mostly due to a key half-buy OG won to prevent the half getting away from them, leading to a 7-8 score.

OG kicked off their T side with a pistol win and conversion, before Natus Vincere replied with four on the bounce. At this point the half became a tense affair, short a and catwalk becoming the main battleground with multiple key rounds coming down to the fact Natus Vincere were struggling to find a way to hold that area of the map. OG took this fact and ran with it all the way to a 16-13 map win, Shahar "⁠flameZ⁠" Shushan specifically deserving praise for his work repeatedly cracking open the A site.

The decider was Mirage, and unfortunately OG could not muster a performance like the one they produced on Dust2. Natus Vincere started on the T side, and after losing the first two rounds, they did not look back. They racked up a monstrous 11 round T half with only two further rounds in reply, largely off the back of a Oleksandr "⁠s1mple⁠" Kostyliev who could not be stopped, the AWPer contributing plenty of frags and two vital clutches.

Natus Vincere won their CT pistol and the second round, taking them up to 13 and giving OG simply too much to do to get back into the map. The boys in blue did manage to win a few rounds to break the Natus Vincere economy and get themselves up to eight rounds, due to flameZ once again seeing huge success entry fragging; however an unfortunate loss to an eco hastened their demise, 16-8 the final score.