EliGE powers Team Liquid to a tense win over NIP - BLAST Bounty day three recap

Team Liquid won a tense series in overtime to move on in BLAST Bounty over NIP.

It took an absolutely monumental effort from EliGE to get them over the line on map three, with the American racking up 34 kills in just 29 rounds with over 120 (!) ADR, in a map that somehow went to overtime. Liquid started Ancient 6-0 up, and still drew the half; it was a wild map.

New boy cairne had a quiet start, but was instrumental in NIP's win on Mirage, which also saw an excellent performance from Snappi, who even busted out the AWP for a round or two. The opening map of Nuke was all EliGE and NAF rolling back the years, though.

We won't draw too much from this game because it's the first game of the year, but neither looked particularly poor or impressive so far.

Inner Circle pulled off a bit of an upset over 3DMAX in the second game of the day in pretty convincing fashion.

They took their map pick and the decider 13-9 and 13-6 respectively to quite cleanly deal with what is a much higher ranked team. There were 15 places between them according to the seeding, which means that Inner Circle claimed a bounty with this win, but it looked far more like the opposite. 3DMAX's only map win was an OT win on their own map pick, which looks a lot more like they were the underdog.

Newest signing cptkurtka023 topped the charts, but it was very much a team effort with each player having big rounds and moments, while 3DMAX similarly had no standout player. Except, they lost.

Falcons comfortably dispatched of ECSTATIC in a pretty simple and clean 2-0, with TeSeS going back to his sentry-gun-esque best at times on Inferno. NiKo was barely needed, which is fortunate as he had a bit of an off-day. If you can't beat Falcons without NiKo, you're going to struggle.

JBa's international debut for M80 didn't go to plan, as he picked up just 13 kills in the BO3 as Gentle Mates strolled to a clean 2-0 win.