Virtus.pro punish Vitality's poor CT sides to grab EWC semi-final berth

Vitality managed a measly four defensive rounds across the last two maps of play.

Virtus.pro have bagged a semi-final spot at the Esports World Cup thanks to a 2-1 victory over Vitality, recovering from a close loss on Mirage (20-22) with comfortable wins on Inferno (13-7) and Dust 2 (13-5).

The Russian squad can now look forward to a semi-final bout with G2, whilst Vitality exit the tournament in 5th-8th place.

Vitality came into this tournament after a disappointing first half of the year, and they continued to struggle today. Fragging power was virtually non-existent outside of Mathieu "⁠ZywOo⁠" Herbaut, and poor mid-round play regularly cost them rounds.

Virtus.pro, meanwhile, seem to be hitting their stride with Denis "⁠electroNic⁠" Sharipov on the roster. Their T sides overwhelmed Vitality across the series and were more varied than with past iterations of the roster, and they were very potent in pistol rounds.

Mirage was a hard-fought and scrappy affair, with the result coming down to who made the final mistake. Virtus.pro were guilty of regularly suffering untradeable deaths, whilst Vitality often fell apart in mid-rounds and gave up advantages.

There were some powerful plays made by players from both teams amongst the chaos, with Dan "⁠apEX⁠" Madesclaire cooking up a wonderful 1v4 clutch whist Evgenii "⁠FL1T⁠" Lebedev kept his team in the map in overtime with back-to-back 4k rounds.

Ultimately, Virtus.pro made a blunder in the third set of overtime rounds that cost them Mirage, Dzhami "⁠Jame⁠" Ali suffering one of the aforementioned untradeable deaths with time low, but the map could easily have gone either way.

Inferno and Dust 2 were both comfortable victories for Virtus.pro thanks to two woeful Vitality CT sides. On Inferno, Vitality couldn't manage a single CT round despite grabbing multiple man-advantages, falling apart regularly in mid-round scenarios, whilst on Dust 2 they lost opening kill after opening kill and couldn't recover.

Vitality were certainly not helped by losing all six pistol rounds played, but their CT woes were the deciding factor in this series.