Losing a close series by a 7-8 margin always hurts. One of the worst such defeats came in Aug. 2022 at the Berlin Major, where Rogue beat FaZe Clan in the grand-final 7-8, 7-4, 7-8, 7-5, and 8-7. And yesterday Rogue, now known as KOI, felt what it was like to be on the receiving end of such a loss.
Their lower-bracket quarter-final against Astralis started off with a close 7-5 win for the North Americans on Bank, but the Berlin Major champions fired back with a 7-5 win on Oregon. The close nature of the game seemed to vanish on the decider map of Border, though, as Astralis raced to a 5-1 lead.
KOI then rallied, swapping to the attack to deal a similar 5-1 half and push the game to overtime. Astralis got to series point a second time, going up 7-6, but the Europeans fought back again to ensure a round 15 would be played. But their luck finally ran out, as Roman "Forrest" Breaux clutched a 1v2 and sent KOI out of the Six Invitational 2023.
“It shouldn’t even have gone to third map,” said Berlin Major MVP William "Spoit" Löfstedt in a post-match interview with SiegeGG. The KOI player rued the missed chances at winning on Bank, where his team conceded two separate 3v1 man advantages in the final three rounds. Had his team hung on for both, they would have been celebrating a 2-0 victory instead.
Despite that map loss, Spoit stated that he felt that his team “won that map” and played “better” than Astralis had overall. They simply had let things slip against a team with players that were very well-practised in clutch situations.
Nevertheless, Spoit shared that his team was unconcerned about their “slow start” on the defence on Border.
“It’s quite normal, we expect that … it’s hard (to defend) on Border,” he said. “When we went back on attack, we actually played our game, you know, like we are supposed to.”
KOI certainly looked like their Major-winning selves on the attack of Border as they took three rounds running, choking Astralis out of the game the same way they had struggled on their own defence.
Their coach Matthew "meepeY" Sharples agreed, stating that his team “knew that [defending on Border] was going to be a slog”. However, their philosophy was to “get the hard side out of the way” and then “drag it back” in the second half -- as they successfully did.
However, ostensibly playing “better” than Astralis has been no guarantee for the four teams that faced them in the lower bracket so far. Most notably, against Team BDS, all of the Astralis players had worse SiegeGG Ratings than even the worst BDS player -- but Astralis won 2-1 after they managed to win nine clutches.
The story was not too dissimilar against KOI. Not only did they lose the 15th round of Border to a 1v2 clutch, but they lost Bank due to two 1v3 clutches and also conceded two clutches on Oregon to make their win a lot closer than it could have been.
“We’re usually pretty good at closing out rounds,” said Spoit. “But it was just not our day, I guess.”
MeepeY agreed, stating that a team playing “perfect Siege” could stop Astralis from getting those clutches. However, playing that perfect Siege on the world championship stage of the Six Invitational is a lot harder.
“They’re just in the right place at the right time,” praised meepeY. “They’re just good clutchers and they put themselves into a lot of clutch situations, so they have a lot of experience with it. They can beat a lot of teams with it.”
Losing in that manner certainly left a bitter taste in their mouth, with Spoit lamenting that his team “should have won the whole event”. But he now believes that w7m esports, who “copied [their] play style since Berlin”, are going to win it all come Sunday.
MeepeY went one step further, stating that he felt that his team’s “mentality” and “ideology” had been “more solid” than during their title-winning Berlin Major run. The difference, he elaborated, was that his team had played better individually in Berlin than here in Montreal. Unfortunately for them, they came up against the one team that they need to be better against individually.
“This time; top six. Next year? I wanna win it,” concluded meepeY.