Image via Ubisoft
Ninjas in Pyjamas’ dream of lifting the Six Invitational hammer for the second year in a row has turned out to be a nightmare. Following yesterday's loss to TSM, the team has been sent home today by their fellow neighbors MIBR.
The Six Invitational 2021 champions perished in a similar fashion to yesterday’s loss. Just like against TSM, today’s match would be played in Kafe and Coastline. The shinobis struggled a lot on Kafe’s defense, conceding three attacks. Meanwhile, MIBR didn’t give their opponents room for mistakes and closed out the first map with four successful defenses.
“We studied NiP a lot on Kafe and their games in Kafe at the Six Invitational haven’t been good,” admitted MIBR’s player Kaique “Faallz” Stephano in a post-match press conference.
Kafe is known to be one of Ninjas in Pyjamas’ strongest maps. However, such reputation has been sullied after the team’s performances in the Six Invitational. The Brazilians have played five times on the Russian map, winning just once against the recently EUL promoted team MNM Gaming.
Ninjas in Pyjamas main problem on Kafe were their defenses, as the team only won 37.5% of their defensive rounds. In Kafe, that’s a huge concern. The Six Invitational 2022 defense win rating on Kafe has been 51%, which makes a big contrast to NiP’s numbers.
Faallz was incredibly confident on the team’s decision of bringing their opponents to what is, or was, historically one of their best maps. MIBR’s pick turned out to be the right one, as the team won 7-3.
Coastline would be a closer contest though, despite MIBR winning five of the first six attacks. Fallz explained that the team expected the match to be like this, as Coastline is a very attacker-sided map.
That was exactly the script for the map, as attackers won 10 out of the 12 rounds on Coastline. With NiP starting overtime on attack, it was logic to think that we would see map three in action. However, in a drastic turn of events, MIBR won the very first overtime defense. Five minutes later, they would win their attack.
Just like that, the SI 2021 champions were out of this year’s Six Invitational race.
MIBR's next stage opponent will be Spacestation Gaming. The Brazilians have lost their last three games against the North American side, and have never defeated them at a major competition – 2-0 loss at the Six Invitational 2020, 7-8 loss at the Six Invitational 2021.
The game will be played earlier today at 4 pm CET.