Two of Thursday’s quarter-finals at PGL Masters Bucharest 2026 replay series from the last fortnight, and in both the team that lost has yet to find an answer to the other.
NAVI face Team Vitality at , two days after a 2-0 defeat to the same opponent in the Swiss stage, and BetBoom Team close the day against FURIA at , eleven days after losing the Thunderpick World Championship final to them 3-2. The four winners go on to the semi-finals, and the grand final is a Bo5 on Saturday 31 October.
The quarter-final schedule
Vitality vs 
NAVI, 
BetBoom vs 
FURIA, The first semi-final place is already taken. Nemiga, who came through the open qualifiers to reach Bucharest, beat FUT 2-0. They won their own Nuke pick 13-11 from 3-9 down at the break and then took FUT’s Dust2 13-9, winning seven of the ten rounds after the switch. syph0, on loan from Spirit Academy, led the series with 30-25.
FUT0-2
NemigaNuke 11-13, Dust2 9-13The event has run ahead of schedule all week, so the later series can start early.
NAVI want a second half
On Tuesday NAVI led Vitality 9-3 at half-time on Dust2 and did not win another round. The 13-9 followed a 13-2 loss on their own Inferno pick, and it extended a pattern that ran through their group stage: across four maps against BetBoom and Vitality, NAVI won four of 34 rounds played after the switch.
They reached the playoffs anyway. A 2-1 win over Team Spirit in Wednesday’s last Swiss round knocked Spirit out and was NAVI’s first series win over them since IEM Katowice 2025. makazze and w0nderful had more than 100 kills between them in the series.
The interview after that win held Aleksib‘s first public comments since a Finnish district court convicted him of aggravated tax fraud on Tuesday. Asked on PGL’s broadcast how he was feeling, the Finn said: “Personally, not so good, but with the CS and everything, I’m just here trying to focus on the game.”
He traced NAVI’s season back to the summer. The team skipped a BLAST event for a two-week bootcamp, went to the Esports World Cup and won their first two matches there.
Then Legacy slaps us. And after that, it’s just been downhill, you know.
The bigger issue, in his view, is that the lineup has been together for a long time, “probably too long, some could say”, to the point where the players end up “speaking about the same situations for the seventh time”. He also said NAVI no longer have a map they can count on, so they build each veto around the opponent instead. That has left them to float between maps all week, and the two picks against Vitality on Tuesday, Inferno and Dust2, both went the other way.
Vitality have no such problem. mezii is calling while apEX is at home for the birth of his child, and jL, who won the 2024 Copenhagen Major with NAVI, has played as the stand-in. The Lithuanian went 27-19 against his old team on Tuesday and said afterwards that revenge played no part.
The history leans one way. Vitality also beat NAVI 2-1 at ESL Pro League Season 24 at the start of October, and NAVI’s last series win over them came at IEM Atlanta in May. The bookmakers on HLTV’s match page price Vitality at around 1.30. The VRS has little at stake for Vitality, who are first, but in HLTV’s forecast on the match page a win would be worth 78 points to NAVI and lift them from 11th to ninth.
BetBoom against the team that keeps beating them
BetBoom were the first team into the playoffs. They went 3-0 in the Swiss stage with wins over Spirit, Nemiga and NAVI, and the last of those was the 17-4 run after half-time that NAVI are still trying to explain.
FURIA took the long way. They lost to NAVI and Spirit, beat DENDELE, TYLOO and Liquid, and reached the quarter-finals with a 2-0 over YEKINDAR’s old team on Wednesday, with YEKINDAR, yuurih and FalleN still not fully over an illness.
Malta is where the rematch comes from. FURIA beat BetBoom 2-0 in the Thunderpick World Championship group stage and then again in the grand final on 18 October. They led that final 2-0 after Cache and Mirage, BetBoom levelled with Nuke and a 19-16 on Ancient, and FURIA won the Dust2 decider 13-6. FURIA have won all four series between the teams since the Cologne Major in June, and the bookmakers have them as favourites again.
FURIA’s own group stage had one bad day, and it was against NAVI. FalleN told PGL’s broadcast on Wednesday that it was “the only game here” he was not proud of: “That game we got completely destroyed and we didn’t really play good.” He also said Nuke against Liquid was his worst map “in the last 20 I played”.
For the 35-year-old, every series now counts down. He has announced his retirement and called Bucharest one of his last three events, and he said he would not change how he announced it, even if it put “a little bit of a heavy on shoulders for teammates”. He said he trains the way he did when he “was 18 years old”, and is “still here at 35”.
In HLTV’s VRS forecast a win is worth 42 points to BetBoom and 17 to FURIA.
Wednesday’s audience
The last Swiss day drew a peak of 591,000 viewers, with NAVI against Spirit the most watched series, according to Esports Charts. Thursday has Vitality, NAVI and FURIA on the same bill. Results and the bracket are on our PGL Masters Bucharest 2026 page.
