VCT Challengers 3 EMEA Playoff live blog

The VCT Challengers 3 EMEA playoffs continue as Gambit, Guild, Acend, NAVI, FPX, Blaze, G2, and Oxygen try to move forward in the upper bracket.

Here’s a live look at each of the round 2 matchups.

Riot Games

G2(2) vs Oxygen Esports(0)

Oxygen has historically struggled on Icebox, and it was no different today.

The CIS team had no answer for G2, who won all but one round on defense. G2 wins 13-2.

Breeze was proving to be a close match before lengthy server-side technical issues forced both of the late games to be pushed to the next day.

When the match went live again, the two teams kept fighting into overtime before G2 won the final two rounds 14-12.

SMB(2) vs FPX(0)

Izzy, the SMB fragger, helped carry his team to a relatively dominant Ascent victory, only losing a few rounds here and there.

Nearly every SMB player out-fragged every FPX player on the map position-for-position, which isn’t good news heading into Split.

This match was pushed to Saturday as well, but wasn’t nearly as close as the first one. When play resumed, Blaze continued to push the pace and took Ascent 13-6.

Gambit(2) vs Guild(0)

Ascent, as usual, saw the defending side take center stage as both teams held off the attackers.

Gambit had a much more effective attacking strategy, though, taking five rounds to Guild’s one and winning the map 13-8.

After a strong Icebox defense by Guild, who only lost four rounds, Gambit rallied for an identical defensive half to force overtime.

In Overtime, the two teams traded rounds, dragging on the contest for a total of 36 rounds of Icebox

Acend(2) vs NAVI(0)

Acend took control of Breeze relatively easily, which is no surprise when you look at NAVI’s history on the young map.

Apart from a few rounds here and there, Acend was in the drivers seat for their 13-7 map victory.

The Acend vs NAVI match mirrored the Guild vs Gambit battle on the sister stream. Both competitions went deep into overtime and saw the leading team take the series 2-0.

Acend was able to take care of business a bit quicker, finishing NAVI after 32 rounds rather than 36. The result was the same, however, as Acend send NAVI to the lower bracket.