ok, so things came to a end on this UnFreeZe tournament with a great grand final where ultimately regular season third place beat the expectations and ended up as the new UnFreeZe reigning champion clan. things never looked in good shape for a Sbornaya that this night probably lost something more than just a final but somehow part of their reputation/honor too. probably things started to go wrong for the Sbornaya way before the Grand Final, likely by the end of the regular season. I have the feeling that "their" competition ended the night of the Thursday 29 of April of 2021 when they completed the regular season as undefeated champions. after that I have the feeling that they just mentally vanished from the competitive mindset needed to go all the way the season to ultimately end up as champions. it's my feeling that I have seen a team going from modesty and ultra defensive gaming to healthy confidence and a attractive balanced game at the peak of their performance (the second half of the regular season) to a
overconfident/arrogant team with a kind of showoff game that thought that all that they had to worry about on the night of the Thursday 20 of May of 2021 was who of them would end up lifting the mvp award and that ultimately came up as a sore loser team. things really started to feel off with the Sbornaya when they showed like 15 minutes late unprepared for nothing less than a semi final and tried to work it out "5vs3" just like that and their overall lack of preparation/focus for this fight, an actual Grand Final, nonetheless was quite evident and ultimately their demise. probably they just failed to see that after they had played together for something like 3000/4000 hours just some very specific maps their margin of improvement was minimal (a few percent) so their league performance was their peak while on the other hand the margin of improvement of some teams that rarely if ever had competed together and that haven't even played those very specific maps more than a few hours casually here and there over that of the league was pretty much
infinite (like doubling just after each fight at the moment).
ok so on that context the gran final started at hub3tourney1 after even had to wait for some of the Sbornaya Rossii guys to install the map for close to 10 minutes (the limit btw) with a clear victory for ILM that simply was better and dominated 10:6 in 9 minutes a Sbornaya that couldn't really do much about it with a solid ironmonkey performance. second game overkill was probably the most important and decisive game of all, likely the Sbornaya had the slight edge here however ILM played better the decisive moments and ultimately prevailed 10:8 on a very disputed game to re-watch and re-analyze probably. with all set for ILM to pick a quick 3:0 victory and settle the tittle as soon as possible in my opinion, as a observer, they made the critical mistake of changing no other than the guy that will ultimately came up as mvp of the tournament (and their perceived de-facto leader), blaze. clearly this proved fatal for them on this game and despite probably winning the exchanges individually without blaze leadership and balance they struggled on a game they never found the teamplay needed to play it and that the Sbornaya took consistently 10:6. that was a very serious issue for ILM as that kept the Sbornaya very alive and at the expense of 6++ virtually sets them for a tie-breaker resolution. clearly that was the case with 6++ that saw probably the ixsy best performance so far against who ILM just couldn't do much but keep trying and trying as usual no matter the hardships setting the resilience mindset needed to go all the way. with one half of the match for each q3dm7 tie-breaker showed to settle the champion and this time similar to the first game the Sbornaya was just simply outclassed by a solid blaze led ILM that although the game ended being very long ILM just
took (broke) in few minutes as by half the game they already lead like 7:2 or something like that. ultimately the Sbornaya resorted to every dirty trick on the book (camp abuse, exploiting non sense thawing etc) to hold on a losing 9:5 score for something like 10 minutes on a really lamentable performance for a team that for other than that had picked momentum and it was playing great so a really disappointing way to terminate the competition. needless to say just after ILM ended up with the trolling knowing the fight was over on their favor they just went head on and finished the job on another 10:6 victory for them and claiming their first UnFreeZe championship tittle. congrats guys on a spectacular victory that on a personal note it even hits home as everybody knows that Россия is way more than just Москва and this time it wasn't a exception as it was quite obvious this Sbornaya was far superior to the team Moskva that pulled the stunt of merely scoring more points on a fight against team UnFreeZe.
on the individual side, it's hard to pick a individual mvp as it has ultimately been very team balanced so I'll probably just go with the stats rank and the winner team and I'll designate blaze as mvp of the finals, congrats on that award too. as for the best sixth of the finals after analysis and my in-game impresions I think I'll go with [ILM]^Blaze , ixsy , fau , ^{BLACK}NASTIA , [ILM]^ironmonkey , ixxaaa on that order and with blaze as mvp of course.
ref notes: ok as usual now the ref notes. quite a few, as mentioned on the first game player poo didn't have the announced like two days ago map installed which is simply totally unacceptable. some extra minutes were given to install it and luckily he ultimately barely made it in time to play it. had no been the case and as already stated before teams failing to play a official map that has been advertised since the beginning for not having it installed before connecting will be ko'ed on that map and the corresponding point given to the enemy team. additionally they didn't make any single change on a two hours fight which of course is not a infraction but it's just a quite unusual thing to note. also let's be fair and note that I don't know who came up/agreed with the map order but the Sbornaya as the semi final A winner had the pitch advantage on this so it's my understanding the fight should have been played overkill , hub3tourney1 , 6++ , q3dm14 and q3dm7 for example understanding that overkill and 6++ were the Sbornaya choices not the other way around. as said I wasn't going to be overruling also that though as mentioned ultimately every part involved had the right (as well as the exclusive responsibility) to elevate such dispute and/or directly make the choices here at any single given instant with or without any further discussion, they didn't, period. as mentioned on the fight commentary above Sbornaya playing behavior on the last game was just not acceptable, not acceptable, they literally spent like more than 5 minutes on a 9:5 death game camping ra and doing nothing but just freeze&thaw themselves over and over with no end and without any serious intent to go for the game. as it was brought before in particular, yes, the freeze&thaw thing is part of the game though as perfectly pointed to some extend. this has been a very clear example of a exploit and why I brought attention to the topic so I really ask people to play fair as if this continues to happen like this and end up becoming the norm/recurrent I'll get rid of that too in way or another. so far at the moment as I said I believe the way the Sbornaya ended the final game was inappropriate/uncalled and just plain toxic thus I'll issue another -1 penalization on this fight for them to take effect on a new league in case it ever takes place and I'll issue a first formal warning against them, if they incur on two more minor penalizations or a major penalization more they'll get banned altogether (not penalized).
and that has been all, thank you very much to everybody for participate and completing the whole thing, hope everybody had fun. as for the demos
here or
here and the videos likely tomorrow on the evening (18:00/19:00 approx).