The defending champion Iem Cologne had a strong start after defeating Astralis in two maps.

Vitality opened the second half of the 2025 season solidly when winning 2-0 against Astralis, and showing impressive performance on the new Map Overpass was brought back to the competition map.

Vitality will confront G2, by Nemanja "⁠hunter-⁠" Kovač, to win the ticket directly into the playoff Iem Cologne. Meanwhile, Astralis will have to fight to keep hope in the losing branch before Furia.

Vitality entered the atmosphere in the opening series, taking the 5-0 lead on Map Nuke-Astralis's choice. The Danish team began to catch up in the end of the first half, winning a few sporadic rounds on the T-side side to end the half with a score of 4-8.

Despite difficulties in T-side on his own map, Astralis woke up with the victory in Round Pistol, balancing the score 8-8. The two teams were constantly taking shredded tat in the second half, but the key processing from William "⁠meziii⁠" Merriman and Shahar "⁠flamez⁠" Shushan helped the international team win the 13-11 button.

Map Overpass - Vitality's choice - takes place with the same scenario; Dan's army "⁠apex⁠" Madesclaire easily led 9-3 in the first half, but could not have an easy victory when Astralis started to counterattack strongly after changing sides.

However, Astralis's efforts are not enough to bring the match into the Overtime series, when the Danish team made a serious mistake in the 5v3 situation against ECO after placing a bomb, so that Vitality ended the map with a score of 13-8, thereby closing a series with a 2-0 victory.

Will Vitality's map pool even more scary?
Before Overpass was brought back to the official competition map, Vitality owned an extremely powerful map of the pool, with an impressive win rate and very little failure during 2025.

However, one of their weaker map is Anubis. The Map has just been removed from this competition system is the least Vitality played in 2025, with only 9 matches, only behind the Train - where Apex's army plays 10 times. On Anubis, Vitality won 6 victories and 3 defeats, reaching the winning rate of 66.7% - the lowest in the entire map pool.

Although Vitality is not weak in Anubis, Overpass returns is an opportunity for this international team to overcome one of the few weaknesses that can be noticed. When choosing Overpass in the opening match of the season, this map can completely become their main choice in the second phase of 2025.