The Show Tournament between the CIS region and several elite teams of Europe is not quite over, but several upsets and a worthy grand finals are the results of the first day. Only One Trick Pony and iTS will meet on Friday for the last battle.
The tournament started with a little bit of delay and several of the European teams using ringers and substitute players to avoid a forfeit, but then went through the bracket with upsets, excitement and great plays from the participating teams.
In the first round of the tournament the rules stated a Best of One format, which came back to haunt two of the favorite European teams in the end. Both QsQ and Mistral Gaming couldn't win their opening match and therefore had an early exit out of the Show Tournament. Their fellow Europeans Pikachu and One Trick Pony actually delivered more positive results and so the Semifinal saw two CIS teams and two European teams compete for the bragging rights of the server regions.
On the other hand, the matches between QsQ and GZ, as well as Pikachu versus Cats, were highly contested and close, decided by several nuances while the other two matches actually ended in a rout one way or the other. One Trick Pony had seemingly no problem with the second best CIS team in QaM, holding the opposing Engineer to a 0-19 stat and Magmus to 1-16 stats. In the fourth and final match of the first round, the Russian team iTS blew away Mistral Gaming with an overall score of 41-11, marking the first victory for the team against the European squad in a long time. According to an admin, those two teams faced each other several times on the international client, but iTS was never able to secure a single victory.
Those results secure a grand final between a CIS team and a European squad, as Pikachu had to square off against OTP, while iTS was facing the Ukrainian team of GZ in the brackets.
In the European portion of those semis, Pikachu was able to win the first match with a farmed and beefy Wild Soul. After that, One Trick Pony rallied back and put the series to a tie, before dominating the third and deciding map as Legion.
In the CIS battle between iTS, the eliminators or Mistral Gaming defeated the Ukrainian team GZ after a hard, long and tough battle.
| iTS vs. One Trick Pony | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
 iTS |  One Trick Pony | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| DnisheBless |  fUzi | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| Domination` | Xibbe | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| Love`N`Stuff | ArchiTiger | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| kSi`z | Znoowy | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| Wladie |  Streufutter | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Now the two combatants will square off on Friday 18 CET to fight for the honor of their server region and for the lions share of the $750 USD prize pool. The winner of the match will take home $500 USD, while the loser will have to settle with $250 USD.
