Natus Vincere vs Fnatic

ELEAGUE CS:GO Premier 2018 ,

Cologne has come to an end and now with all of the teams making moves in order to prepare for the Major in September, we find ourselves at one of the last few international events before then; The ELEAGUE CSGO premier. In this tip, we will be looking at two teams who will likely have a closer game than that of Cloud9 vs Astralis. These two teams are Fnatic and Navi, and they will be taking each other on in a best of three fashion.

Navi :

Natus Vincere or Navi have been bringing the pro-scene to its knees ever since Astralis began creating a dominant name for themselves. Navi has won the past three international LAN events; Starseries i-League Season 5, CSGO Asia Championships 2018 and ESL One Cologne. Navi has proven that they are a top team and though they went through a rough patch with Zuez bottom fragging consistently and S1mple always being the star, the team has now developed to allow Electronic to find his form and for Zuez to not play as poorly. He is still the In-game leader and I don't expect much from any in-game leader, but he has improved tremendously.

Navi's map pool looks like this; Mirage is 14-2, Inferno is 7-5, Overpass is 9-2, Nuke is 7-2, Train is 801, Dust 2 is 0-4 and Cache is 0-1

Fnatic :

Fnatic was a team on the upswing until the team decided to replace Golden for former Nip member and Faze Clan fill in: Xist. This roster change would almost halt all progress for Fnatic and would lead the team into replacing another member, Lekro, for a "one for one" trade with Nip for Draken. The core of Flusha, JW, and Krimz still remains in-tact, but there is no questioning that these roster changes have had a negative effect on the team as a whole.

Fnatic's map pool looks like this; mirage is 6-3, Overpass is 2-7, Train is 4-2, Cache is 2-3, Inferno is 1-3, Dust 2 is 0-1 and Nuke is 0-1

Map Pick/Ban :

This is a best of three series, each team will ban out two maps, pick two maps, and the leftover map will be the decider. Regardless of these picks and bans, the maps will favor Navi. Fnatic are forced to ban out one of Navi's worst maps; Dust 2 while Navi will happily ban out one of the better Fnatic maps; Cache. After banning out the best maps of Mirage and Train. We are left with Train, Nuke, and Overpass. Navi has a full map advantage in all three cases.

Final Thoughts:

Unfortunately for Fnatic, they got matched-up round one against the team I feel will win this entire event. Navi has been on an absolute tear and with the maps favoring Navi in this match-up, they should breeze by with no issues. I'll claim that Navi will take this series 2-0 and that a medium bet on Navi shall be a profitable one with these odds.