Playoffs bracket set at ESL Pro League S15

3-4-2022 23:51

The current top-three teams in the world — Natus Vincere, FaZe, and Players — ended up on the same side of the bracket.

The playoff bracket has been set at ESL Pro League Season 15 following the conclusion of the group stage on Sunday, which saw Natus Vincere claim first place in Group D and leave HEROIC in second place, while Astralis clinched the final spot.

The group stage saw many surprises, some of the most notable of which were FURIA's run to first place in Group B and Movistar Riders' stunning upset campaign in Group C, while fan favorites such as G2 and Vitality missed out.

FaZe have a difficult road ahead after placing third in Group B

The series of upsets, which also witnessed FaZe and Players unable to live up to their status of heavy favorites and top their respective groups, has resulted in a bottom-heavy bracket due to seeding rules in place for the playoffs.

Those rules most of all ensure that first and second-placed teams from the same group can't meet until the grand final, and first and third-placed teams can't meet until the semi-finals at the earliest.

The headliner of the round of 12 matchups is undoubtedly the clash between the No. 2 and No. 3 teams in the world according to HLTV.org's ranking as of March 28, FaZe and Players, with current No. 1 team Natus Vincere awaiting the winner in the next round.

You can see all the opening matchups and the playoffs bracket below. For a detailed schedule, head over to the tournament page.

Round of 12 (Tuesday-Wednesday)
HEROIC vs. Liquid
fnatic vs. ENCE
Entropiq vs. Astralis
FaZe vs. Players

Quarter-finals (Thursday-Friday)
Ninjas in Pyjamas vs. HEROIC / Liquid winner
Movistar Riders vs. fnatic / ENCE winner
FURIA vs. Entropiq / Astralis winner
Natus Vincere vs. FaZe / Players winner

ez for navi

2022-04-03 23:51

4 replies

too ez

2022-04-04 02:10

3 replies

Rigged but ok

2022-04-04 06:44

2 replies

russian fanboy spotted

2022-04-04 10:59

1 reply

I am a fan of Russia TWC 2016 lineup

2022-04-04 19:34

ez for furia

2022-04-03 23:52

2022-04-04 02:24

ez for me

2022-04-03 23:54

can confirm

RIP FAZE/GAMBIT

navi will choke for the first time, mby...

2022-04-04 08:50

rigged for nip. still will lose tho

2022-04-03 23:55

ofc until they meet better team

I like your name

2022-04-04 00:24

unlucky bracket for gambit

2022-04-03 23:56

They shoot themselves in a foot again (same in major) by not winning easy group.

2022-04-04 00:56

+1 lost to movistar because of one silly eco round win by riders, and at the major lost to EIQ hence falling in Navi's bracket, Gambit are getting no chill always in the toughest bracket since the last 5-6 tournaments no easy ride and yet they make the playoffs everytime and sometimes even semis

2022-04-04 21:09

EZ4ENCE

2022-04-04 00:00

So Heroic Liquid and Faze Gambit is the worst bracket. They have the tougher opponent in the quarter as well.

2022-04-04 00:01

CIS quarterfinals and CIS semifinals. LFG!

brackets seem so balanced -_- what a joke

It is explained in the article why. It may appear a bit strange to see top 1, 2 and 3 in the same bracket, but FaZe and Gambit did somewhat surprisingly not finish as top 1 in their groups: Only Group D followed - at least my - predictions.

2022-04-04 00:09

Agree. It's disappointing but fair.

2022-04-04 01:25

its all about performance, not the names on it!

2022-04-04 00:17

the 3 best teams are in the same bracket zzzzzzzzz

2022-04-04 00:02

how are top3 teams in the same side of the bracket?

2022-04-04 00:08

27 replies

#25

2022-04-04 00:11

There are 3 different teams other than Gambit that finished their group as 3rd. The team with the lowest seeding could have faced Faze aka the top2. Same shit with Gambit

2022-04-04 01:23

Whatever ... The explanation in the article should be clear: FaZe and Gambit should've won their respective groups in terms of rating, but they didn't! In other words I guess we are seeing THE most competitive scene at the very top these days! Astralis 1.0 and Liquid taught the entire world how to play this game back in 2018-19. Since then we've seen numerous top1's. For now we are seeing NaVi as the "biggest gorillaz" around these days. No specific traits characterizing any "NaVi era" except from being ... the biggest gorillaz around. In short I don't think there is much more to talk about who's gonna win this tournament.

2022-04-04 01:40

the brackets were set following the performances of the teams, and not the rankings

2022-04-04 00:19

22 replies

How do they differentiate the performance of 2 teams that both finished their group as 2nd?

2022-04-04 01:24

21 replies

Ever heard of seeding? ESL had the bracket set before the tournament even started

2022-04-04 01:39

15 replies

Yeah very great seeding lol :)

14 replies

if no one shit the bed, same bracket would look like this: Heroic v BIG - G2 Vitality v Mouz - Players NIP v Astralis - Faze Liquid v Outsiders - Navi take issue with underperforming teams

2022-04-04 02:42

12 replies

The issue is that their seeding sucks lol. #78 There is no excuse for putting top3 teams in the same side of bracket where at least 2 will be eliminated in quarters

2022-04-04 03:22

11 replies

have the top 3 teams play like that and they wouldn't be in this position. If Faze and Players had won their groups, earliest possible meeting between any of those 2 would've been in the semis.

2022-04-04 03:31

10 replies

dude there are 4 top2 and top3 teams and both players and faze have 3 other potential teams that they could have faced (actually make it 2 because they cant play against their own group), so they could have totally made a different bracket where top2 and top3 teams didnt have to play in the first match just to face the top1 team in the next match

2022-04-04 04:25

Too bad they cant just change it. doesnt work like that 👍

2022-04-04 12:57

They wouldnt have had to change it if they didnt implement a shitty bracket system in the first place

2022-04-04 21:47

exhibit A: imgur.com/a/Y5HzeMk

2022-04-04 04:57

6 replies

and why should they? I'm a Faze fan: if they didn't want to face Players and Navi, should've just won against ENCE. same for Players against Movistar Riders. play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

2022-04-04 05:47

"and why should they make an actual reasonable bracket"

2022-04-04 06:02

I couldn't find confirmation, but I believe the bracket was set before the tournament started. What you want is for them to make a very subjective bracket after seeing which teams qualified just to avoid a couple favourites playing each other - no serious tournament should make something like this.

2022-04-04 14:11

They dont have to make a subjective bracket. If I'm not wrong, there are 4 possible brackets that could have worked out, and they could have written an algorithm to find which bracket would have the better seedings or something

2022-04-04 21:52

You do understand that the seeding for playoffs was made beforehand and it was pure chance that not only NaVi, Players and FaZe landed in groups B, C and D (since I assume groups were drawn by ESL World Ranking?), but also they had to land on the exact same spots they did, yes? For example, if FaZe would have gotten second and Players third, the entire playoff bracket would have been drastically different. You cannot however change a pre-agreed playoff seeding because you don't like the outcome of groups. How stupid would that be? "Oh, so, uh, the best teams kinda all fucked it up real hard, so we have to change the seeding or they will all go out too early"?

2022-04-04 07:25

yeah, that's exactly it.

2022-04-04 22:31

Ok, blame faze and gambit

2022-04-04 12:55

They mentioned it in the article - they wanted to prevent teams that already played in the same group to play each other again. In Blast groups and some other event recently the same teams keep playing each other again and again and everyone was complaining.

2022-04-04 02:11

They still could have had a different bracket while keeping that rule. There's more than one possible way to make the bracket work

2022-04-04 03:21

Heroic-2nd on group D vs Liquid-3rd on group C Fnatic-3rd on group A vs Ence-2nd on group B Entropiq-2nd on group A vs Astralis-3rd on group D Faze-3rd on group B vs Players-2nd on group C none of the teams on the brackets finished on the same positions

2022-04-04 02:14

Thats not even what I was talking about

oh, ok, the make these differences with the ''RD'' i think, it means, ''Rounds difference'' basically, if you win a map, by for example, 16-13, you will get 3 positive points on the rd, but if you lose the map by 16-13, you will get -3 rd points, and it counts by all maps in all the matchs, doenst matter if it was 2-0 or 2-1, because if you lose a map, it will get negative points the teams that have the most rd positive points, that its the highest 2nd team, will play against the lowest 3rd team that have the smallest amount of rd points

2022-04-04 03:24

The seeding of who goes where in the bracket was already defined before the groups even started. As in: it's the third place of group B vs second place of group C. It just so happened that this is Faze vs Players. It's not great, but it's what they chose and it's not really their fault that the teams played poorly. It's their fault for choosing a shit format in general.

2022-04-05 01:13

why is headtr1ck in fantasy instead of bomble?

2022-04-04 00:13

of course Faze-Gambit and of course Navi after 5-0 in 1/4 vs Faze/Gambit ESL trash

7 replies

ive said to many idiots on this comments and now i have to say again THE BRACKETS WERE SET FOLLOWING THE PERFORMANCES OF THE TEAMS, AND NOT THE NAMES OR THE RANKING!

2022-04-04 00:20

That doesn’t change the fact the brackets are ass

2022-04-04 00:22

5 replies

no its not the brackets for it self, it was the teams performances that based on these brackets, so theres no reason the blame esl for making these brackets, and yet the teams that made bad performances, or the teams that made good ones

2022-04-04 00:23

Well the groups were ass too anyway so it didn’t help for seeding in playoffs

2022-04-04 01:36

This is what people seem to miss. Group B was so insanely stacked.

2022-04-04 01:49

uh, ooh yes, ''ass'' Faze in 3rd almost not getting to the playoffs with the worst performance on the 3rd places, and Players in 2nd losing to MVS Riders and getting the best performance on the 2nd places as it goes, all the teams here on playoffs first round had many difficults matchs and poor performances, so it all goes to blame the teams

2022-04-04 02:18

2022-04-04 03:11

Less go NAVI

I THINK MOVISTAR RIDERS have a chance to be in Semi finals or even finals!

2022-04-04 00:25

NIP or Heroic should be beat them. But definitely the easiest bracket ever for MR.

2022-04-04 01:51

I have ENCE getting to the semis on that side of the bracket. Bold, but they look good and if Maden can keep up the performance he's shown in the groups, the other teams are definitely going to have trouble. Movistar looked decent, but they got one upset over Players, but the rest of that group is wack in terms of performance. I don't rate BIG and Liquid high at all. But Movistar-ENCE will be an interesting match-up to see who makes it.

2022-04-05 01:17

ez for players

2022-04-04 00:35

hahahah faze fans prepare your copium 0-2 loss to onliners on lan XD

2022-04-04 00:38

One: Gambit aren't on-liners. Their performance on LAN isn't as great, but they still are a really good team. Otherwise they wouldn't be at least a top 5 team still, even though there's been LANs for more than 6 months. Two: Faze's record against Gambit is good. Why would it suddenly be a 2-0 loss? It's possible, but I don't think it's likely.

2022-04-05 01:20

Entropiq smash astralis and furia with relative ease

2022-04-04 00:42

Furia will crush any of them

2022-04-04 01:57

I love players but I think FaZe will win

2022-04-04 01:01

Heroic > Liquid EZ fnatic < ENCE EZ Entropiq < Astralis FaZe < Players EZ

Natus Vincere vs. FaZe / Players winner is a real final

2022-04-04 02:19

I don't think, NIP FURIA and Heroic will come strong. Entropiq might surprise. FaZe - jks doesn't win anything Players is a good team for 3/4 position NAVI is always favorite

2022-04-04 02:33

Will liquid lose another 1v5?

2022-04-04 02:52

Time will tell my friend don't you worry :))

2022-04-04 03:18

Luckily they don't stewie to over peak again and throw the round

2022-04-04 03:27

wdym lmao he literally died afk-ing

2022-04-04 09:25

Faze is more promising than players imo, navi faze would be the best bo3 of this event.

2022-04-04 02:53

not another faze matchup BRUH, fuck this event whole groups been some clown shit, except for D

2022-04-04 03:00

movie star riders group was nice

2022-04-04 04:35

All of the quarterfinal matches are going to be great, even if nip/ liquid somehow happens lol

Hero > Liquid/Nip Ence > m.riders/fnatic FURIA > astralis/entropiq Navi > all

2022-04-04 04:32

Astralis has a chance here bro.. wait and watch

2022-04-04 05:08

Nip vs navi final?

2022-04-04 05:45

Brollan plays for NiP. ?

2022-04-04 06:00

They can't change. They can only use the lineup they registered before the tournament start

2022-04-04 06:10

He is a sub so they will probably sub him in immediately or not use him at all

2022-04-04 08:47

He is sub for fnatic. Rosters was locked before.

2022-04-04 08:49

He is registered on HLTV as a sub for NIP but you might be right

Only one of the top 3 teams will reach finals, underdog tournament overall, but boring matches on the first bracket. NaVi-FaZe will be better than the final IMO, unless a miracle happens and gambit wins faze, well that would be cool too

LMAO no G2, no Vitality, no VP. Well, I guess Astralis is making to the semis and Heroic to the grand final. NAVI>>>>>>>>all anyway. Players might be the dark horse......or Faze is they play with jks KEKWKEKWKEKW

2022-04-04 09:01

ENCE Fnatic MRS <<< Trash bracket

2022-04-04 10:34

let's go Gambit :)

2022-04-04 10:42

EZ4NAVI

2022-04-04 11:35

movister rider in Semi

2022-04-04 12:30

Expecting FURUA to make it to semis, same thing with Navi, FURIA if there was a moment to make an upset, this is the chance.

2022-04-04 13:37

+1 against Entropiq or Astralis they are the favorites to reach semi-finals. There, against NAVI, will be the biggest chance they have to win a big t1 tournament

2022-04-04 16:27

Will there be crowd?

2022-04-04 15:23

go go FaZe <3

2022-04-04 17:39

heroic < liquid fnatic < ence entropiq > astralis faze < gambit nip < liquid riders < ence furia > entropiq navi > gambit liquid > ence furia > navi furia > liquid

2022-04-04 22:02

Bold American hopes there. While I could see Furia reaching the semis and then upsetting NaVi/Faze/Gambit, Liquid haven't really looked good enough to beat Heroic AND NIP AND whoever meets them in the semis (probably ENCE).

2022-04-05 01:27