FaZe secures IEM Katowice title after stellar 3-0 series!

With FaZe having to play with Justin “jks” Savage as a stand-in due to the absence of Håvard “rain” Nygaard and G2 having to without their important coach Remy “XTQZZZ” Quoniam, both of the Grand Finalist at this year's IEM Katowice was a bit weakened going into Sunday’s title-decider.

The loss of the 33-year coach, seemed to be a bigger problem for G2 than FaZe missing their experienced Norwegian, as FaZe succeeded to 3-0 Nikola “NiKo” Kovac and company and grab the $450.000 1st prize.

Inferno

The Bo5 series began on the iconic Inferno, which ended up giving the Spodek Arena and the hundreds of thousands of viewers a fantastic opener to the match. It was G2 that got off the best start as they managed to establish a stellar CT side.

With the momentum from the first half, Aleksi “Aleksib” Virolainen and the rest of G2 went up 15-7 and looked extremely confident in taking FaZe’s first map pick. However, it didn’t look like FaZe were informed about that plan. Because with a phenomenal comeback, where the Estonian star rifler Robin “ropz” Kool stepped up massively, averaging a 2.11 Rating on the CT side, FaZe succeeded to snatch the map in front of G2’s noses.

Just look at how ropz saved FaZe to send the map onto overtime.

Mirage

One would think that it would be near impossible to top the tension and entertainment from the first map on Inferno. However, that was exactly what happened on G2’s map pick of Mirage.

68. That was the number of rounds the two Grand Finalists had to fight against each other before karrigan and FaZe called game and secured an incredible 31-28 win after a super-intense series, which offered no more than five overtimes.

In the end, it was FaZe’s mercenary in Justin “jks” Savage who was the man that settled the map with an extremely important 1v1 clutch on the B site against Aleksib.

Dust2

After two consecutive maps with two 11-4 half time scores, Dust2 stepped in and stopped the CT dominance, as FaZe and G2 took turns taking round one after another from each other.

The close battle continued in the second half and there wasn’t much separating the two sides – like we have seen the entire Bo5 series. With that being said, FaZe had no plans to take it all the way to a fifth map. In fact, they thought three were enough, which they cemented by winning 16-14 on Dust2, despite another heroic performance by G2's Nemanja "huNter-" Kovac.

FaZe – G2 3-0 | IEM Katowice 2022 (Grand Final)

19-15 (Inferno) | ropz – 1.45 Rating / 32-17 K-D / 89.9 ADR

31-27 (Mirage) | huNter – 1.34 Rating / 57-44 K-D / 106.3 ADR

16-14 (Dust2) | huNter – 1.36 Rating / 29-22 K-D / 90.5 ADR

MVP: Russel “Twistzz” Van Dulken – 1.22 Rating / 97-82 K-D / 90.6 ADR