A day after losing an 8-4 half-time lead to FUT, Team Vitality turned the same situation around against NAVI. Down 9-3 at the break on their own Dust2 pick, they won all ten rounds of the second half for a 13-9, after taking NAVI’s Inferno pick 13-2. Still without apEX, the top team in Valve’s Regional Standings go into the PGL Masters Bucharest 2026 quarter-finals with three wins and one loss, while NAVI must win on Wednesday to stay in the event.
Vitality2-0
NAVIStatsInferno 13-2, Dust2 13-9
makazze
Ten rounds after the break
On Monday, Vitality were the team that could not hold on. They led FUT 8-4 at half-time on Anubis, lost the next eight rounds and with them the series and a run of ten series wins.
On Tuesday evening it went the other way. NAVI won the pistol round on Dust2, broke Vitality’s economy early and kept them on Galils and pistols for much of the first half. makazze held the pit on long A, w0nderful picked off players with the AWP, and b1t won one round almost on his own with four kills. A ropz quad kill in round ten was one of only three rounds for Vitality’s T side, and NAVI went into the break 9-3 up.
Vitality then won the second pistol round, and NAVI did not win another. The defence was built around ZywOo, who held the window above B with an AWP and stayed there even when NAVI came at the site with pistols, and around Vitality’s grenades, which caught NAVI on almost every approach. Aleksib’s calls on the T side put his team in four or five rounds they could have won, among them a 3v3, a 1v2 and a 4v3 retake on B. NAVI lost all of them. The last round ended with mezii alone against two players, walking out on long A and killing both.
The second-half problem is not new for NAVI. Against BetBoom on Monday they led both maps at the break, 7-5 on Dust2 and 8-4 on Nuke, and still lost 2-0. Over their last four maps, NAVI have won four of the 34 rounds played after half-time.
An Inferno pick that never got going
The first map was NAVI’s choice. They removed Cache, Vitality removed Ancient, and NAVI picked Inferno, a map they had not played in Bucharest. Vitality won the first ten rounds on the CT side before NAVI got on the scoreboard, led 10-2 at the half and needed only three more rounds after the switch.
mezii, who is calling for Vitality while apEX is at home for the birth of his child, went 19-9 on Inferno with 129.3 ADR and a KAST of 100%, which means he had a hand in every one of the 15 rounds. On the other side, iM finished the map with two kills, 15 deaths and 13.3 ADR. He found his form on Dust2 with 14 kills, but his series ended at 16-32.
Before Tuesday, NAVI had only lost Dust2 at this event when they picked it themselves. Their own pick did not go any better this time. All week they have moved between maps without one they can lean on, and against a team with Vitality’s depth on Dust2 and Cache that leaves them little room in a veto.
jL against his old team
jL won the 2024 Copenhagen Major with NAVI as the tournament’s MVP and left the club on 1 July. Tuesday was his first official match against them, and his 27-19 was his best kill-death difference from four series as Vitality’s stand-in at the event. Asked by PGL’s broadcast whether he had wanted to remind NAVI that he was still around, the Lithuanian said revenge played no part.
Remind them? No. Revenge also no. I mean, it’s fun to play against your old friends. You know how they play, you know what they expect. So it was fun in that regard, but revenge or get them back, there’s nothing to get them back for.
He also said he had not signed anything for next year, and that his job in Bucharest was to take Vitality as far as possible rather than to audition for another team. On the title, he had no doubts: “When you have four players like that, there’s no doubt in our minds that we can win the tournament, but it’s just a question of how.”
One more chance for NAVI on Wednesday
Vitality are the fifth team into the playoffs, after BetBoom and FUT at 3-0 and Aurora and MOUZ, who also finished 3-1 on Tuesday. The quarter-finals start on Thursday. In Valve’s Regional Standings the series changes little for either side: HLTV’s estimate on the match page adds four points to Vitality, who stay first, and takes three from NAVI, who stay 16th. NAVI’s place at the Singapore Major was already settled.
What is left to settle is their week. NAVI now sit on two wins and two losses with FURIA, Spirit, Liquid, Nemiga and The MongolZ, and the six play the last Swiss round on , and . The three winners join the eight-team bracket; the three losers go home. NAVI’s opponent is Spirit, who lost 2-1 to MOUZ earlier on Tuesday, in the last match of the round at . The full pairings are on our PGL Masters Bucharest 2026 page.
