Heroic vs. BIG – ESL Pro League Season 18 Upper Semi-Finals Overview

Group B’s matches are underway and we now have the Upper Final contenders – a game that will go down on Sunday at 14:00 GMT. Here, we’ll see how BIG overcame Heroic in a clean 2x0 series in order to reach the Upper Final stage.

Team Profiles

Heroic

Heroic has been living a good phase when it comes to their performances. They’ve recently lost the title of the #1 CSGO team in the world by Vitality, which in no way means that they’ve reached a breaking point. On top of that, the Opening Round was very good for Heroic after the clean 2x0 against Rooster. So, the expectations were high for cadiaN and his teammates.

BIG

BIG has also been performing pretty well this season, having accumulated 6 wins in a row (four wins at CCT North Europe Series 7 – where the team got 1st place – and two during the ESL Pro League Season 18. With that in mind, this game could have gone either way.

Pre-Match Expectations

The emotions were mixed for this match, which is very reasonable. Despite Heroic’s clean win against Rooster, BIG came in with a winning streak that could certainly boost the team’s confidence. As we said, no one – not even experts in the field – was certain enough to take a solid guess about this game’s outcome.

One thing to keep in mind is that Heroic won the last encounter on BLAST Premier Fall Groups, but as we’ve seen by the results, this wasn’t enough to scare BIG away.

Match Highlights

First Map (Ancient, picked by BIG)

The first map was probably the longest we’ve seen so far on ESL Pro League Season 18. The game only came to an end after the 6th overtime, which was won by BIG with a score of 25x23.

The name of the game here was Krimbo with 42 kills and a 1.38 Rating 2.0 on HLTV. Tabsen also showed good CS and deserved the 1.20 Rating he got. In short, the game was very close but a few nuances during the 6th overtime allowed BIG to capitalize and bring the map home.

Second Map (Inferno, picked by Heroic)

With Inferno being Heroic’s pick for the series, all the odds were pointing to a decider – which would be played on Mirage, if needed. And as we now know, the series never got to that decider.

Despite the close score of 16x13, BIG’s players were individually superior to Heroic as a whole, which led to a close but comfortable win for the Germans (and the Polish, mantuu). Here’s a breakdown of the stats for this match, they can definitely show the discrepancy of the individual performances:

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