Aurora win PGL Masters Bucharest 2025 after thriller final vs. Legacy

Aurora defeated Legacy in an intense grand finals to win PGL Masters Bucharest 2025, their first LAN trophy ever, on November 1st.

As we predicted in our PGL Masters Bucharest grand finals preview, it was a scrappy battle between the Turkish and the Brazilian teams. Aurora enjoyed a great start to the series, as they won Dust 2 (13-11) and Mirage (13-8), putting a lot of pressure on Legacy.

Legacy, however, showed once again their grit by winning Train (19-17) and Inferno (13-8) to force the fifth map.

On Nuke, Legacy had a good chance to at least reach map point territory, but Aurora held their own and won clutches to secure the trophy with a 13-11 victory.

Aurora wouldn’t have won PGL Masters Bucharest had Ismailcan “XANTARES” Dörtkardeş not shown up. The superstar finished the best-of-five ginals with a 103-83 K/D, 90.5 ADR, and 1.36 rating. He was the only player on Aurora to finish with a positive K/D and deservedly took home the first LAN MVP of his career.

Aurora end their slump ahead of the Major

Things were looking grim for Aurora before they won the trophy. Credit: © PGL

The PGL Masters Bucharest trophy will provide a huge confidence boost to Aurora ahead of the StarLadder Budapest Major. The team’s morale crumbled during the group stage after a loss to SAW, and their IGL, Engin “MAJ3R” Küpeli, went so far as to say they were going through their worst period in two years.

In post-match interviews, the Aurora players said what this trophy means to them. The Turkish team finished runners-up in at least four notable tournaments in the past few years — Esports World Cup 2025, BLAST Bounty Spring 2025, ESL Pro League Season 20 in 2024, and BetBoom Dacha Belgrade 2 in 2024 — and have had mixed results since the BLAST.tv Austin Major 2025.

“Sometimes things weren’t going our way, but today we managed to make it for the first time,” Özgür “⁠woxic⁠” Eker said after winning PGL Masters Bucharest. “Before the Major, it’s also going to give us great confidence.”

Additionally, XANTARES mentioned in an interview with HLTV that the team have a mental issue they have to fix.

I don’t think [winning the tournament] is going to fix all our issues, but we have one month, and we will just go to bootcamp, and watch our games. We will also talk and try to fix many things. But we also have a little bit of a mental issue inside of the team — we sometimes choke so badly, and we need to work on this for sure.

PGL Masters Bucharest 2025 final standings, prize pool distribution

Feature image credit: © PGL