ECS Season 8 - Finals: Event Preview and Key Storylines

ECS Season 8 - Finals: Event Preview and Key Storylines

Aditya Singh Rawat
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Cover Image Courtesy: ECS | Thumbnail Image Courtesy: ECS

The Esports Championship Series Season 8 - Finals which is all set to start tonight will witness a total of eight qualifying teams go up against each other for a lions share of the $500,000 prize pool. The event set to start in a few hours is taking place at the Esports Stadium in Arlington, USA and will be coming to an end on 1st December.

Event Format

The eight teams have been divided into two groups of four teams each following a GSL group format, with the opening matches being a single game affair, following which every other match will be a best-of-three series.

Group - A
Group - B
AVANGAR
Astralis
Evil Geniuses
Fnatic
Ninjas in Pyjamas
MIBR
Team Liquid
Sharks Esports

The top two teams from each group will move ahead to faceoff in the playoffs featuring single-elimination bracket.

Key Storylines

Astralis after securing a slot for IEM Katowice 2020 following a victory at IEM Beijing 2019 will be looking to maintain their momentum, as they fight it out for another first-place finish. While Astralis can still take it a bit easy, it will be a proving ground for EG, Liquid, Fnatic and MIBR as the four teams will be vying to put their best foot forward and make it to through to the playoffs at the very least.

  • Since there victory in Chicago, Team Liquid has been not getting into the groove of things, finishing with unsatisfactory results at multiple tournaments, and they would definitely be desperate to get back to the form they were in before the Berlin Major.

  • Despite their dual victories at ESL One New York and StarSeries & i-League Season 8, EG has failed to inspire confidence in everyone to name them as a certain threat going into an event. This can be due to their heavy irregularity in performance, a clean run through ECS should help them blow away these doubts against them.

  • MIBR has been putting up good performances but is still quite far from ascertaining any kind of talks about them making it back into the top half of the circuit. The Brazilian team still needs a win under their belt before such talks have a chance of even materialising into existence, let’s see if they are able to achieve a deep run here.

  • Fnatic after failing to mark their presence at the Berlin major this year were certainly pumped to prove that they were not done yet, and they came back well with a victory at DreamHack Masters Malmo 2019 followed by a second-place finish at StarSeries & i-League Season 8. Will the Swedes continue to keep up this good work is the big question.


With the three remaining teams being the wildcards of this tournament, it will be interesting to see if AVANGAR, NiP and Sharks can cause an upset or not. This Season 8 Finals can go in a lot of different directions, so stay tuned as the action starts to unfold tonight on both Twitch and Caffeine, in multiple languages.

Twitch: English | Russian | Swedish | Brazilian | Caffeine: English


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Aditya is the in-house CS:GO writer at AFK Gaming. While his understanding of the esports space is not restricted by geographical borders, his current focus lies in the Asian region. Understands and follows almost all major esport titles.

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