malbsMd powers Liquid to survive at HEROIC's expense - IEM Cologne Major

malbsMd has been a shining light on Liquid since his signing, and he put in a stellar second map performance to drag Liquid over the line.

After a quiet first map, he showed up in droves to end HEROIC's hopes and dreams far sooner than many would have expected. Within his 26 kill haul he collected seven multikills and six opening kills, and it's hard to imagine anyone could have had more impact out of the players in the server.

What's incredible is that HEROIC won four 1vX's in this map and still lost. When you're getting all the close rounds and still don't take the map, something has gone seriously wrong.

Also, when you lose to Liquid...

HEROIC came into this stage as one of the favourites and have bombed out pretty spectacularly. We weren't massively high on them because they tend to be unreliable, but even the least favourable read on them would have had them being better than this.

Liquid, on the other hand, survive with a much-needed win at a time where they have been in short supply. Every win for them, right now, feels like five.

It took an absolutely colossal performance from JamYoung to ignite TYLOO and squeeze them into a 2-2 game.

The talisman for TYLOO dropped 61 - 27 more than anyone else on his team - over the three maps to pull TYLOO kicking and screaming past a resilient Sharks. This was not a pretty game from the Chinese team, but showing they can win an attritional, ugly game is somewhat promising for their future in this event.

Sharks will go home gutted, but can be proud of what they've shown. We would not be averse to seeing them at more events, as they've proven to be an interesting team with some decent players that many of us wouldn't have watched before.

Snax rolled back the years to top the charts against BIG, and was putting in some crazy work with a MAC-10. Snax is hungry, something something BIG MAC(10)?

We'll workshop it.

These were too super-tight maps, and Snax was the best player in the first map and won what turned out to be a very important 1v3 on map two. We love watching Snax, and want to see more of him. Fortunately we'll get to.

MIBR coasted to victory over a lacklustre Lynn Vision, FlyQuest predictably smashed THUNDER dOWNUNDER and M80 outmuscled NRG.

Today's results can be found here, and tomorrow's games here.

Tomorrow's games include an all-Asian game to begin with as TYLOO meet Lynn Vision in a grudge match, an extremely interesting one narratively with Liquid vs FlyQuest (that's an absolute must-watch humdinger) and a slightly less exciting NRG vs BIG, which will probably see quite a simple win for blameF and co.