w0nderful went 25-4 on Falcons’ own Inferno pick, and NAVI won 26 of the last 33 rounds to end the Cologne winners’ run in Beijing.
NAVI are in the quarter-finals of IEM Beijing 2026 after a 2-1 win over Team Falcons in the Group A lower bracket final on Wednesday: 11-13 on Ancient, 13-4 on Inferno and 13-3 on Mirage. Falcons, who won the IEM Cologne Major, leave in seventh to eighth place with $54,500. It is the second time NAVI have beaten them this week, after a 2-0 on Monday.
NAVI2-1
FalconsStatsAncient 11-13, Inferno 13-4, Mirage 13-3
makazze
Falcons steal NAVI’s pick
For one map, it looked like the rematch would go the other way. kyousuke opened Ancient, NAVI’s pick, with three kills in the pistol round and an ace in the eco that followed, and Falcons led 5-1 before holding a 7-5 lead at the half.
NAVI had the two best players on the map. w0nderful went 27-14 and b1t 25-11, but iM and Aleksib finished on 7-17 each, and Falcons won the rounds that mattered on their T side. NiKo won a 1v3 with a well-timed molotov on the bomb to keep Falcons in touch, and later karrigan won a 1v3 of his own with the bomb down when either team losing would have been broke.
At 12-11, Falcons won a 3v3 in the last round of regulation, and kyousuke ended the map 22-19 with 100.1 ADR.
25-4 on Falcons’ Inferno
That was as close as Falcons came. Inferno was their own pick, and they had beaten NAVI 13-6 on it at ESL Pro League on 6 October. This time they did not win a single opening duel in the first nine rounds of their T side.
The man in the way was Ihor “w0nderful” Zhdanov. The 21-year-old AWPer was 17-1 before Falcons found a way to kill him a second time, and NAVI led 9-3 at the break.
karrigan had tried to calm things early in the half. In a timeout aired on ESL’s broadcast he told his team to “just listen to my voice, and I’m gonna take you through this game”. The IGL finished the map 1-14 with 27.5 ADR.
m0NESY won the second pistol round almost alone, sitting the defuse with milliseconds left, but NAVI took the force-buy straight after and the last four rounds. w0nderful ended Inferno 25-4 with 131.9 ADR and 94.1% KAST, one of the best LAN maps of his career. NAVI wrote on X before the decider: “You couldn’t ask for a better response to dropping map one.”
Mirage without w0nderful
On Mirage the AWPer went 7-10, and it did not matter. NAVI won all 12 rounds of their T side, taking the streak to 16 rounds in a row since m0NESY’s pistol on Inferno. makazze even found a knife kill in front of a crowd that was firmly behind Falcons.
makazze went 16-5 on the map, b1t 15-5 and iM 17-10 with 112.8 ADR, his best map of the series after a quiet Ancient. Falcons won three rounds after the switch, starting with the pistol, before NAVI closed it 13-3.
b1t finished the series 54-22 and w0nderful 59-28. Across the last two maps, kyousuke went 12-31 after his strong Ancient.
Major champions out in the groups
Falcons beat FaZe and HEROIC to reach this match, but a roster with NiKo, m0NESY and karrigan now finishes outside the top six in Beijing. Their last event, the Thunderpick World Championship, also ended with series defeats to BetBoom and Aurora, and karrigan finished this one 23-45.
NAVI have won three of their four series in Beijing, and the 2-1 defeat to FURIA on Tuesday is the only loss. They play a quarter-final on Friday 6 November, the same stage as FURIA after The MongolZ took Group A. We follow the playoffs on our IEM Beijing 2026 page.
