With a 2:0 against Alternate Attax, BIG Academy won the German “Counter-Strike: Global Offensive” league ESL Championship. However, there are still unanswered questions about the starting place for IEM Cologne.
“It was a great tournament. You can definitely tell that the German scene is alive,” said Elias “s1n” Stein in an interview after the game. “We fought to the max. We deserved the trophy.”
BIG Academy was the first finalist to win the Upper Bracket, with Attax beating Epic Dudes earlier that day. The final quickly developed into a close duel in which BIG Academy narrowly won 2-0 (16:13; 16:12) on two long maps.
The championship title grants BIG Academy a starting place in the play-ins of the IEM Cologne. The fact that two players from the first team, Karim “Krimbo” Moussa and Marcel “hyped” Köhn, played in the final may have tactical reasons. BIG could compete in Cologne with up to four players from the main team, which itself has not yet secured qualification through the ESL World Ranking.