Astralis knocked down to the lower bracket by s1mple and company!

One of the big favorites for BLAST Premier Fall Finals has been knocked down to the lower bracket by Natus Vincere, who won a hard-fought series on Nuke (16-12) and the decider Dust 2 (16-14), after losing the first map of the series on Inferno (14-16), in which the Danes had a solid offensive that Perfecto and company couldn’t stop in the end.

B1T made his debut on the server as he got to fill flamie’s spot for the first map of the series. The new talent struggled individually against the superstars from Astralis, and even though s1mple was there to pick up the slack, leading his side in the close battle, the effort wasn’t enough and the Danes got off to the best start on the series.

flamie slotted in instead of B1T on the next map and was back in action for Nuke, but in the meantime, Astralis substituted Xyp9x for Bubzkji, who have been undefeated on Nuke since joining the team. Bubzkji and Astralis were leading 12-6 and were inches away from keeping their record on the map, but all of a sudden s1mple showed up and the Ukrainian beast made a streak of six consecutive multi-kills to pull his squad through to the deciding map of the series by a ten-round run on the defense where s1mple ended up getting 21 kills and only died once, all the way to the end.

A close affair on Dust2 decided the series and the Russian-side came out in full control taking an 8-1 lead on the CT-side, but the Danes managed to take over and got off on a dominant run that equalized the score. NAVI and s1mple didn’t give up as they picked up the pace and won several-late rounds to wrap up the series 2-1.

s1mple showed what a monster he is in this series, finishing on top of the scoreboards with an overall rating of 1.44, 90.7 ADR, and an 83-46 score. The Ukrainian and the rest of his team will face off against Vitality on Thursday at 16:30 (CET) for a spot in the upper final of the tournament, while Astralis have a tough task ahead of them in the lower bracket.