picture courtesy of Epicenter
In a clean 2-0 series, Team Secret eliminated Invictus Gaming from EPICENTER Moscow 2017 - with YapzOr continuing his domination.
The group stages at EPICENTER Moscow 2017 saw some massive surprises and upsets, but with that stage ending early yesterday morning, only 6 teams remained. Now the main event would begin and the first game of the day would see Invictus Gaming going up against Team Secret. iG still had not shown anything close to the performances that they had at DAC earlier this year – but the dominance of the other Chinese team could work in their favour. For Team Secret, they definitely showed that they were looking much stronger than they had been in recent times, only losing a single series in the group stages to LGD.FY. With elimination on the horizon for one of these teams, they would both give it their all especially with a $500,000 prize pool on the line at EPICENTER.
Game One
With some rather amazing picks coming out from both teams, Team Secret secured a quick first blood in their aggressive tri-lane top. Through the opening ten minutes of the game, Secret took a fairly decent lead, but iG were not out of the game at all. However, the first full team fight came out at the Dire’s tier 1 tower in the mid lane and it saw Secret rip through 4 of iG’s line up with ease. From this point, the Radiant team continued to have almost perfect trades, getting kills and dropping towers across the map – securing their lead once more.
After twenty two minutes, Secret used their advantage to take down Roshan and claim an aegis, but the game slowed down a fair amount, giving iG a brief respite from the dominance of Secret. The slow pace of the game seemed to work in iG’s favour as they found some great fights to come back into the game and for a while they took complete control and seemed almost ready to take the game.
However, after an elongated period of back and forth fights, with Yazied 'YapzOr' Jaradat being the saving grace constantly for Secret – stealing countless spells over and over again with his Rubick – the Radiant managed to make a brilliant showing and force out the GG from iG. Both teams looked certain of victory many times throughout the game, but Secret proved how strong they currently are as they dismantled the Dire’s line-up and took game one after just over an hour.
Game Two
As the bounty runes spawned up at the start of the game, a big fight came out which saw Team Secret claim 2 kills as iG got only a single one, but an extra bounty rune for their aggression. Once more, Team Secret took control of the early game, with YapzOr completely controlling the game. With only ten minutes passed, the Dire team were 8-2 ahead with 5 of those kills being granted to Yapzor’s Clockwork.
As the game slowed down from around twenty two minutes, iG found some space to farm up and get a few items onto their cores as they attempted to find their way back into the game. But it did not last long as Secret found a fantastic initiation to drop 4 from iG which they followed with a kill on Roshan and a high ground push.
With only thirty minutes passed, Team Secret dropped the mid lane barracks and left Invictus Gaming with no choice but to call GG giving Secret a 2-0 victory. Unfortunately for iG their road at EPICENTER Moscow 2017 would end here, while Team Secret move forward to face Evil Geniuses in one of tomorrow’s semi-final clashes.
