BetBoom trailed at the break on both maps, then won the second halves 8-3 on NAVI’s Dust2 pick and 9-1 on their own Nuke. Magnojez had 24 kills on Nuke, and BetBoom join FUT Esports as the second team through to the playoffs of PGL Masters Bucharest.
At half-time on both maps, the scoreboard said NAVI. They led 7-5 on Dust2, a map they had picked themselves, and 8-4 on Nuke after winning the last seven rounds of BetBoom’s T side. Over the two second halves that followed, BetBoom won 17 rounds and NAVI won four.
That is how the bookmakers’ underdog finished the Swiss stage without a defeat. BetBoom had already beaten Team Spirit and Nemiga, while NAVI came in on the back of 2-0 wins over G2 and FURIA. They had also won both maps they played against this BetBoom lineup, at IEM Atlanta in May.
BetBoom2-0
NAVIStatsDust2 13-10, Nuke 13-9
zorte
makazze
Nine rounds out of ten on defence
Nuke was BetBoom’s pick, and for most of the first half it looked like a mistake. They won four of the first five rounds with fast, committed hits on A, then lost seven in a row as NAVI’s defenders read every move. NAVI went to the switch 8-4 up and needed five more rounds to force a decider.
They got one. BetBoom won the second pistol round and turned their CT side into a wall. NAVI’s attack was barely able to plant the bomb, and their only round of the half came when iM won a clutch with three kills. Every other round went to BetBoom.
Magnojez was the centre of it. After a quiet Dust2, where he finished 11-16, he went 24-16 on Nuke with 115.6 ADR, mostly from the outside of the map, where he kept cutting down makazze, the player NAVI rely on to open space. Magnojez and s1ren won ten of their twelve opening duels on the map between them, and Magnojez ended the series with a knife kill in the final round. makazze finished Nuke 10-18.
NAVI lose their own pick
Dust2 was the surprise of the veto. NAVI had won the map twice in Bucharest when opponents picked it against them, and this time they chose it themselves. For a half, the choice looked smart. w0nderful beat zorte in AWP duel after AWP duel, and NAVI closed the half with a round on pistols alone, Aleksib opening it with a Tec-9 double on 1 HP.
BetBoom won the second pistol round with a fast split on A, and the half became a round-for-round fight. The rounds that decided it were small fights: three-on-threes and two-on-twos in which BetBoom found the trade and NAVI ran short of time. s1ren, normally the quiet anchor of the side, was the one who kept turning them, with 18 kills on the map and a late clutch on the B site that delayed NAVI’s retake until the bomb went off and took BetBoom to 12. They closed it 13-10.
w0nderful finished the map 23-14 with 98.8 ADR, his best map of the event, and ended up on the losing side. Across the series he was the best player on the server, 40-29, while Aleksib and makazze were ten or more kills short of their deaths and b1t six.
Boombl4 against his old team
Boombl4, who won the 2021 Stockholm Major as NAVI’s in-game leader, faced his former team. His own numbers were modest, 28-27, but his calling got the credit for the T side on Dust2 and the rotations on Nuke, where BetBoom seemed to have an answer ready for every NAVI attempt. Asked after the series whether he thinks about his exit when he faces NAVI, he said it was too long ago, that he has a new team and that he is not playing for revenge.
zorte, the AWPer who carried BetBoom through the first two rounds, was less dominant this time but still finished 36-25. He now has 136 kills in seven maps at the event. The one weak spot was d1Ledez, 21-30 and only 7 kills on Nuke.
Two paths out of the 2-0 pool
BetBoom’s quarter-final is on 29 or 30 October. On HLTV’s forecast of Valve’s Regional Standings, the win is worth 22 points and a step from seventh to sixth, a week before Valve takes its snapshot for the Singapore Major.
NAVI have not lost much on paper. They drop only six points, their Major place was settled on Sunday, and on 2-1 they get a second chance in round four on Tuesday. The question for them is whether a team that played this well for two halves can find a way to win the other two.
Results and the next pairings are on our PGL Masters Bucharest 2026 page.
Spirit and Liquid stay in the race
Team Liquid won Legacy‘s Ancient pick 13-10 and their own Inferno 13-8. malbsMd led the way with 34 kills, while latto’s 41-25 was not enough for Legacy. Liquid go to two wins and a loss, Legacy to one win and two losses.
Team Liquid2-0
LegacyStatsAncient 13-10, Inferno 13-8
JT
latto
tryTeam Spirit needed all three maps against FURIA. They took FURIA’s Nuke pick 13-7, lost their own Ancient 8-13 and won Mirage 13-11. donk had 59 kills and 96.9 ADR. Spirit also move to 2-1, and FURIA drop to 1-2.
Team Spirit
FURIA
tN1R
