Vitality have taken the final playoff berth at BLAST Open Porto, beating FUT 2-0 in the Group B lower bracket. Vitality won 13-7 on Anubis and 13-8 on Dust2, and Dan "apEX" Madesclaire finished the series with 101.7 ADR, according to HLTV.
The win completed a recovery run that began with a 0-2 loss to Inner Circle in Justinas "jL" Lekavicius' first match as a stand-in, and continued through wins over 9z and Legacy. HLTV reported that the team looked more cohesive as the tournament wore on.
How the series went
FUT arrived at BLAST's studios in Denmark directly from a run to the Esports World Cup final, with little time to reset or practise. HLTV reported that the shortfall showed in the playoff decider, where the team's overaggression was punished round after round.
Anubis began well for them. A triple kill from Nikita "cmtry" Samolotov, together with a 3v5 conversion involving Dmytro "dem0n" Myroshnychenko and Džiugas "dziugss" Steponavičius, put FUT 4-2 ahead. The map turned on an eco round in which Mathieu "ZywOo" Herbaut won a 1v3 clutch, and Vitality drew level by the half. On the attacking side they punished FUT's aggressive CT tendencies, with jL, ZywOo and apEX all multi-fragging on the way to a 13-7 finish.
Dust2 was more one-sided still. apEX kept finding high-impact kills while Vitality sat back and let FUT overpeek, and cmtry struggled against an on-fire ZywOo as the score reached 9-3 at halftime. FUT clawed four rounds back off the second-half pistol before running into a wall: back-to-back B hits out of spawn were shut down by Robin "ropz" Kool and ZywOo, and Vitality closed the map out shortly afterwards.