Aurora’s coach ashhh put his team’s level at PGL Masters Bucharest 2026 at “four, five, six out of ten maybe” after Tuesday’s match. It was still enough. Jimpphat won the rounds that decided two of the three maps as the defending champions beat Team Liquid 13-11 on Anubis, 11-13 on Inferno and 13-10 on Cache to become the third team into the playoffs. Liquid go into Wednesday’s last Swiss round with two wins and two losses.
Both teams came into the match at two wins and one loss, and the series was as even as the scores suggest. On Cache, Team Liquid led 10-8 and had the better of the T side play, taking their time before they went for mid control, while Aurora took mid straight out of spawn with little regard for how Liquid reacted. Aurora won the last five rounds. The broadcast’s analysts left the match convinced that Liquid had played the better Counter-Strike, and that the difference came down to individual rounds from one player.
That player was Jimpphat. He finished with 52 kills and 39 deaths, the best rating on the server and by far the biggest share of round swing.
Team Liquid1-2
AuroraStatsAnubis 11-13, Inferno 13-11, Cache 10-13
| Team Liquid | K-D | +/- | ADR | KAST |
|---|---|---|---|---|
 malbsMd | 52-48 | +4 | 84.0 | 70.4% |
 NAF | 47-43 | +4 | 69.0 | 77.5% |
 EliGE | 48-53 | -5 | 77.6 | 69.0% |
 Jorko | 37-42 | -5 | 51.7 | 67.6% |
 JT | 39-46 | -7 | 68.8 | 71.8% |
| Aurora | K-D | +/- | ADR | KAST |
|---|---|---|---|---|
 Jimpphat | 52-39 | +13 | 75.0 | 76.1% |
 woxic | 54-45 | +9 | 74.2 | 69.0% |
| Wicadia | 46-45 | +1 | 69.6 | 69.0% |
| XANTARES | 43-47 | -4 | 65.3 | 66.2% |
 kyxsan | 36-47 | -11 | 69.7 | 76.1% |
Two rounds at 8-10
The Finn’s series began on Aurora’s own Anubis pick, where he went 17-9 and won a one-against-three clutch with a Galil. That clutch and an eco round Aurora won in the second half decided a map that finished 13-11.
Cache was where he turned the match. Liquid were two rounds from the playoffs at 10-8, and the next round looked like theirs too. EliGE went up on a boost at Quad and killed four, leaving Jimpphat alone against him and JT. Jimpphat won the one against two. In the following round he picked up a second AWP and took three kills, two of them without scoping in. At 11-10, woxic won a duel against JT that the Liquid captain had set up on his own terms, with the bomb and the clock on his side, and Aurora closed the map from there.
Aurora have now won with little from XANTARES more than once in Bucharest. He went 11-19 on Anubis and finished the series with the lowest rating on the server, after 30-49 against The MongolZ and 27-33 against Nemiga earlier in the event. With Jimpphat anchoring sites and winning late rounds, and Wicadia at 20-13 on Cache, it has not cost them.
A coach who expected the holes
Aurora are into the playoffs of the event they won in 2025, but the road there has been uneven. They lost their opening match to The MongolZ, giving up their Nuke pick 2-13, and won two overtime maps on the way past G2 and Nemiga. On Inferno against Liquid, their T side ran out of answers, as it had against G2.
ashhh did not pretend otherwise. He said the team has “barely played a game of practice in weeks”, that communication has at times been poor, and that players have lost the feel for their positions. He said the mood that won Cache came out of the Inferno defeat.
We lost a lot of belief because I don’t think we’ve been playing that great this tournament, but then I think at the end, we just found some passion and it got us over the line.
He saw the win as progress all the same. In his first months with the team, he said, one or two things going wrong would make everything shut down. “You want to be able to play not your best Counter-Strike and just be able to win games,” he said.
Liquid’s best series in weeks, and a last chance on Wednesday
For Liquid, the defeat comes with a different kind of evidence. Before Bucharest they had lost 0-2 to magic and 0-2 to fnatic in October. Here they beat MOUZ, swept Legacy, and took Aurora to the last rounds of a third map.
Inferno showed what they can do. Aurora won eight rounds in a row after Liquid’s pistol win and led 10-4 early in the second half. Liquid then won nine of the last ten rounds. malbsMd held banana on the CT side and was hit with attack after attack there without giving way, and he finished the series with the highest ADR on the server, 84.0. NAF went 18-14 on the map and was Liquid’s best player over the series, with the team’s highest rating. Jorko had the lowest ADR on the server, 51.7.
The defeat costs Liquid five points in HLTV’s projection of Valve’s Regional Standings, where they slip from 17th to 18th, while Aurora gain seven and stay fourth. Liquid’s place at the Singapore Major is no longer in doubt in the same simulator, so Wednesday is about Bucharest alone: one more win puts them in the quarter-finals, another defeat ends their event in ninth to eleventh place.
Their opponent is not yet known. Nemiga, who beat DENDELE 2-0 on the other stream, are also on two wins and two losses, and the rest of the decider round is set once Tuesday’s remaining matches are done. Results and pairings are on our PGL Masters Bucharest 2026 page.
