You might have noticed that the activity in the Nations Cup hasn't been very big in the last two weeks. Due to some unexpected circtumstances things got a bit delayed and we are very sorry for that.
But now here's a big update, here come the Playoffs!
First, let's have a look how things were going in the base groups...
In the
Group A there were
Austria,
Poland B,
Russia A, and
United Kingdom. Sadly team Austria wasn't able to participate because they were missing players in the lineup so the competition got reduced to three teams.
Favourites of this group were the Russian team and UK and it did work out for them very well. Russia A
defeated Poland B in both maps, even well known Polish Claustrophobolis routine wasn't good enough to achieve at least 1:2 score for Poland. UK has also beaten Poland in both maps, so it was the time for the deciding match between the two rivals. Scores of this game are not available yet, but from what is known, maps were 1:1 and UK gone into some connection problems so they gave Russia A a walkover for the decider. Could be quite interesting match.
So the winners of this group are
Russia A, followed by
United Kingdom and
Poland B,
Austria is taking the 4th place, but question is if they will play any matches in the Playoffs.
In
Group B there were teams
Czech republic,
Finland,
Hungary and
Portugal with Finland as the clear favourites of this group. Their lineup is made by the core members of the current top 4on4 team
The Viper Squad with
Milton in the lead of things,
Fifi has stepped up to join them in the finnish national team. However we haven't seen Fifi playing in the last NQR match of his clan
clan Malfunction, so it's a question if he'll play with these guys also in the Playoffs, maybe we will see a "TVS only" lineup.
The Czech team was the most active team in this group (and even in the whole tourney), but it didn't help us too much, we lost to Finland with huge frags margin and also Portugal showed as undoubtedly stronger team giving us another 0:2 loss. In
match against Hungary we managed to win our home map Castle of the Damned (e1m2), also Claustrophobolis (dm2) was looking good, but Hungary handled the second half of the match better.
For the remaining matches in this group I'm not sure how many walkovers were there, but I know at least about one. Too bad Hungary didn't try to play match with Portugal, could be quite interesting match.
So the final standings in this group are:
1st:
Finland, 2nd:
Portugal, 3rd:
Hungary, 4th:
Czech republic.
As Group B was dominated by Finland, so was
Group C dominated by
Netherlands, none of the teams
Denmark,
Germany nor
Sweden B were able to make a serious challenge for Murdoc+Reppie combo. Report from
Netherlands vs. Germany match has been published on this site, Netherlands also won by a large frag difference over Sweden B team. Sweden B on the other side
won by a huge margin against Denmark, however they
lost 0:2
to to Germany, so this made the final standings in this group:
1st:
Netherlands, 2nd:
Germany, 3rd:
Sweden B, 4th:
Denmark.
The hottest group of the tourney for sure was the
Group D.
Poland A,
Russia A,
Sweden A and
Sweden C, all very good teams which made this group the hardest to predict. Sweden A managed to achieve
comfortable win against Russia A, they also have 2:0 for the matches against the other two teams, but as far as I know those matches have not been played. Russia A
won against Poland A 2:1, Poland managed to win in Castle of the Damned (e1m2), surprisingly for me they lost by a huge frag difference in Claustrophobolis (dm2), and so along with the results of the Poland B team, one would start to think that the "Polish dm2 routine" spell is out of mana. The decider was dm3 which was taken home by Russia quite comfortably.
But here they were, to prove you wrong about the spell, in match against Sweden C, after a big loss in The Abandoned Base (dm3), victory in Claustrophobolis by Poles was here. The decider though was completely in hands of the Swedish team. Other matches were mostly walk-overs due to some inactivity, but it would not change much on the final standing in this group which are:
1st:
Sweden A, 2nd:
Sweden C, 3rd:
Russia A, 4th:
Poland A.
Base groups resultsSo the base groups stage is definitely over, final standings of the teams decided how the teams will be placed in the Playoff brackets. You can check the Playoff brackets here:
Winners bracketThe tournament will be played using Full Double Elimination system (Losers bracket will be up very soon), I hope we will see lots of interesting matches.
In the first round which should be played this week we will for example see
Poland A vs. Russia A,
United Kingdom vs. Russia B,
Portugal vs. Sweden B and
Hungary vs. Germany,
all very interesting matches, where scores are expected to be very close.
If players announce the
schedule of their matches, you will be able to
bet on the matches too.
I wish all the teams good luck!
hf in the next games and think big guys!!