Cloud9 avoided early elimination and will face fnatic for a spot in the Play-in.

bLitz leads The MongolZ team with an index of 1.26 across 4 maps.

Day 2 of the online phase of the Thunderpick World Championship ended with The MongolZ advancing to the Play-in, leaving just one Bo3 match between them and a spot in the $770,000 LAN finals in Germany.

Garidmagnai "⁠bLitz⁠" Byambasuren's squad topped Group B after a 2-0 win over Cloud9 in the opening match and against fnatic in the group win. They won three consecutive 13-11 victories before having an 11-1 spurt to close out Dust2 convincingly with a score of 13-7 against Benjamin "⁠blameF⁠" Bremer and team. These results come just days after the team finished 3rd-4th at Elisa Masters Espoo, where they lost to eventual champions ENCE in the semi-finals.

Meanwhile, 9z continued to struggle against top teams since their surprise advance to IEM Dallas, leaving the tournament in last place in their group. They lost 1-2 to fnatic in the opening match and continued to lose to Cloud9 in the knockout match.

The match day was not without tension from the majority Russian team. Kirill "⁠Boombl4⁠" Mikhailov repeatedly wavered between feelings of utter frustration and joy on camera while competing, especially in their win over 9z, when they nearly lost their 10-2 advantage on Mirage.

“There were two reasons,” Konstantin "groove" Pikiner said of the disappointment after the series. “To be honest, we didn't play many official matches in September or October. When you don't have the experience of playing regularly every day, you need time to get back in shape.”

"The second reason is when you are 10-2 on the T side, you feel very confident, so maybe you have too much emotion that prevents you from performing at your best. You almost won this map, so you start thinking about the next map, and sometimes some players have such thoughts in their mind. But anyway, they [9z] played very well , when we even concentrated on defending in area A, they still entered there and we couldn't stop them."

Since the addition of Kaisar "⁠ICY⁠" Faiznurov, Nikita "⁠HeavyGod⁠" Martynenko and Timofey "⁠interz⁠" Yakushin, Cloud9 has not been able to instill much confidence and the lack of matches could be surprising. beneficial, especially with the RMR round of the Shanghai Major coming up. They will face a tougher test in the group decider against fnatic on Friday, as the British organization won their last encounter at IEM Rio's closed qualifiers two months ago.