xertioN was named MVP as MOUZ conceded only 15 rounds in the grand final and lifted their first IEM trophy of the CS:GO and CS2 era.
MOUZ are the IEM Beijing 2026 champions after a 3-0 win over The MongolZ in Sunday’s grand final, 13-5 on Mirage, 13-6 on Dust2 and 13-4 on Inferno. They finish the event 11-0 in maps. The title is worth $360,000, and The MongolZ take $210,000 for second place.
MOUZ3-0
The MongolZStatsMirage 13-5, Dust2 13-6, Inferno 13-4
PR
TechnoThe curse is broken
MOUZ had come close at IEM level for years without ever finishing the job, and their in-game leader Dorian “xertioN” Berman had lost all five IEM finals he had played before Sunday. In Beijing the wait ended in under three hours. MOUZ posted the result with a line that summed up the week: no map dropped all tournament.
On stage after the final, ESL’s host told the players that no team had won an IEM event of 16 or more teams without dropping a single map before. MOUZ went through TYLOO, BetBoom twice, PARIVISION and The MongolZ, five series and 11 maps, and the final was the most one-sided of them all.
Mirage set the tone
The MongolZ had the better start. They won the opening pistol round on MOUZ’s own Mirage pick and made it awkward early, enough for coach sycrone to call a timeout with his players looking far from comfortable. It turned the map. MOUZ shut down the middle on the CT side, with xertioN, Lotan “Spinx” Giladi and xelex fighting for it together, and led 8-4 at the break. The second half lasted six rounds.
xertioN went 23-10 with 126.1 ADR on the map. nin9, who only joined The MongolZ from The Huns a month ago, finished it 4-16.
A Dust2 pick that backfired
With MOUZ removing Anubis and The MongolZ taking out Nuke, the closest map in their recent meetings, the underdogs chose Dust2. It was MOUZ’s second weakest map over the last three months, but the pick surprised xertioN.
“I don’t think it would be the map that I actually expected them to pick here, but yeah, I mean, they picked it and we came in and we showed a good Dust2,” he said in the post-match interview.
For a while it looked like a decent idea. MOUZ were in control early, but 910 finally got his hands on the AWP, The MongolZ bought four of them in one round late in the half, and bLitz found picks with the bomb on his back. They pulled level at 6-6. It was the only spell of the final where MOUZ were under any pressure, and it did not survive the switch: MOUZ won all seven rounds on the T side. Spinx finished the map 22-8 with 102.2 ADR, and the last round summed up the gap. MOUZ ran straight into B with Ádám “torzsi” Torzsás on a P90 and closed it 13-6.
No way back on Inferno
Inferno, MOUZ’s pick, was the shortest map of the day. xelex pulled MOUZ out of a 2v5 with a quad kill early on, The MongolZ coach maaRaa used another timeout, and At 6-1 xertioN produced the play MOUZ later posted with the caption “thats just mental”.
PR, who arrived from GamerLegion in July, was MOUZ’s best player on the map with 17-10 and 100.0 ADR. MOUZ led 9-3 at the half and needed only five more rounds after it. Techno was the one MongolZ player to keep going, 19-9 with 107.2 ADR on Inferno and 41-40 across the series, but the rest of the side were well below their level from the wins over FURIA and NAVI. bLitz finished the final 24-44 and nin9 24-45. The last round began with Techno giving up the opening kill, and torzsi closed out the title.
The IGL who carried the fragging
xertioN was named DHL MVP of the event. He took over the calling this year and has still been one of MOUZ’s main fraggers, and in the final he led the server with 47 kills, 98.1 ADR and 85.2% KAST. He went 40-20 in Saturday’s semi-final against BetBoom as well.
Spinx, who played under apEX at Vitality, had no doubts about his in-game leader:
xertioN did an amazing job. He’s the best fragging IGL right now in the scene, of course.
xertioN himself played the award down.
The MVP is just a small bonus, but it was the goal all along that I’m not going to be a burden for the team. So I’m happy to also step up in the playoffs and help the guys win some maps.
The rest of the lineup shared the load. All five MOUZ players finished the final with a positive K-D, and xelex, promoted from the academy in April, and PR are both in their first season with the main team, and for four of the five it is the biggest trophy of their careers. Spinx was asked if it had felt as easy as it looked. “Even when we didn’t play our best, we just kept winning rounds,” he said.
The MongolZ run out of answers
For The MongolZ it was still a good week. They won Group A after beating FURIA, swept NAVI on Saturday and reached their first big event final in 14 months, only a month after rebuilding around nin9 and cobrazera. But the final followed the pattern of their recent meetings with MOUZ. MOUZ have now won six of their seven series against them, including the 2-0 in Bucharest two weeks ago, and The MongolZ never got to Ancient, the map they had won six times out of six over the past three months.
Earlier on Sunday NAVI took third place with a 2-0 win over BetBoom.
Into Singapore as the team to beat
MOUZ were already first in the VRS before the final, and HLTV’s VRS calculator had the title adding six more points. The MongolZ stay ninth after a small loss of six points. It is MOUZ’s second trophy of the season after the BLAST Bounty Season 2 Finals in August.
Both teams now turn to PGL Major Singapore, which starts on 24 November. The MongolZ begin in Stage 2, while MOUZ go straight into Stage 3 as the form team in the world and, for the first time in a long while, as IEM champions. The full results are on our IEM Beijing 2026 page.
