DK have finally broken their duck against NewBee, taking a 2-1 victory over NB in the Grand Finals of the ECL Spring 2014.
The past two days have seen four major Chinese teams playing at a LAN tournament, in a best-of-one double elimination bracket, that concluded with a best-of-three grand finals. The eSports Champion League is one of the highlights of Chinese tournaments since it traditionally features open booths that allow the players to trashtalk each other.
In the first round of matches, Dk prevailed over Invictus Gaming while NewBee took out Vici Gaming. In the Winner's Bracket finals, DK were shunted down to the Loser's Bracket finals after an unconvincing display against NewBee. The Winner's Bracket Final match saw DK giving away Lycan and debuting a new support duo with Kunkka and Shadow Demon, but NewBee outplayed them, especially with Mu's Queen of Pain dominating the match. At the same time, IG prevailed against VG, eliminating them from the tournament, and progressing to the Loser's Bracket Finals to meet DK again.
The Loser's Bracket Finals saw DK winning on the back of BurNing's Morphling having uninterrupted farm across the entire match, and eventually dominating IG despite iceiceice going 1-8 for the early part of the match. With this, DK progressed into the Grand Finals, going up against NewBee who started with a 1-0 advantage.
However, DK swept the series in two straight games, both on the back of convincing performances from BurNing outfarming NewBee's entire team on Luna and Naga Siren. The first match was somewhat of a thriller as the game went down to a semi-base race with DK losing both their Tier-4 towers before enough rotations took down Hao's Morphling. The second match also went to the wire as DK appeared to emerge victorious mostly from some costly mistakes by Hao to be caught multiple times on Slark without his buyback.
With this victory, DK have finally clocked their first victories against NewBee since returning to China in April after StarSeries Season IX. DK's victory sees them going home ~$9.6kUSD richer, as well as possessing a lot more confidence despite some shaky performances against the other top teams in China.
The 2014 Spring edition was however marred by multiple delays, including technical issues that saw entire teams disconnecting from the game. Another notable delay was when the game between iG and DK was paused 3 minutes in for more than half an hour, because the organisers had forgot to give out prizes to the spectators. As such, they interrupted the game to conduct lucky draws and ensure that the players handed out the prizes to the winners.
Final standings:
1st - Team DK (~$9,660USD)
2nd - NewBee (~$4,830USD)
3rd - Invictus Gaming (~$1,600USD)
4th - Vici Gaming
