sh1ro-less Cloud9 begin Thunderpick campaign with fnatic victory

Stand-in Kirill "⁠Boombl4⁠" Mikhailov was seen splitting sniping duties with Ilya "⁠Perfecto⁠" Zalutskiy in the team's debut without the AWPer.

The first day of the $500,000 Thunderpick World Championship has now concluded and saw the opening matchups of Groups A and B played out.

It began with the highlight match of the day and Cloud9 taking a hard-fought victory over fnatic in their debut without Dmitry "⁠sh1ro⁠" Sokolov, who made the shock request to be put on the team's transfer list on Thursday.

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Boombl4 is standing in for the team in the online tournament and has been seen splitting the sniping duties with Perfecto so far and finding solid success with the Big Green.

The stand-in's 2.00-rated performance on the CT side of Overpass, where he did the majority of AWPing, were all for naught, though, as Cloud9 lost the map following a lackluster Terrorist side.

That didn't matter in the end thanks to the Russian squad picking up wins on Ancient and Inferno on the back of a superb Abay "⁠HObbit⁠" Khassenov showing. On the other side, an inspired William "⁠mezii⁠" Merriman performance was not enough for fnatic.

The rest of the day went rather as expected.

In the second of four matches of day one, Monte dismantled Wildcard in the North American representatives' first-ever showing outside of their home region, 13-2 on Overpass and 13-6 on Anubis.

Virtus.pro and Ninjas in Pyjamas engaged in a much more closely-contested fight. That was decided on Inferno by David "⁠n0rb3r7⁠" Danielyan, who put up a 16-3 score in the latter half on the defense to pull the series over the finish line for his team.

IEM Sydney winners, FaZe, ended the day with a landslide victory over SAW, 13-6 on Anubis and 13-6 on Nuke.

On Saturday, Groups A and B will continue with the first two teams locking in a playoffs spot and two teams being eliminated in the winners' and elimination matches:

Date	Matches
Thunderpick World Championship 2023
28/10/2023	fnatic 10:00 Ninjas in Pyjamas	Match
28/10/2023	Cloud9 13:00 Virtus.pro	Match
28/10/2023	Wildcard 16:05 SAW	Match
28/10/2023	Monte 19:00 FaZe	Match