G2 defeated Eternal Fire 2-0 to begin their ESL Pro League Season 17 campaign. Ilya #m0NESY Osipov’s standout effort pushed his team to a 16-9 win on Anubis before the team had to tighten up their defenses to achieve a 16-14 victory on Nuke.

Despite the tighter result on the second map, where they had an 11-4 advantage at one point, before Eternal Fire battled back, the European team continued to demonstrate their absolute supremacy. With this triumph, G2 has now won 13 consecutive offline series matches, 12 consecutive Ethernet matches in Nuke, and 15 consecutive games overall.

m0NESY’s clinic

From the beginning to the end, m0NESY completely dominated Anubis, with an early run of rounds from Eternal Fire doing little to slow the young Russian superstar’s progress. With the aid of an ace from Mer #imoRR Karatas, the Turkish team won the opening pistol round and used that victory to jump out to a 5-0 lead, but from that point on, m0NESY and G2 swiftly locked them out of bombsites.

The BLAST Premier World Final MVP led his team to ten straight victories and was virtually unbeatable for the majority of the first half, finishing with an insane 22 K/D, 142 ADR and 2.21 rating for G2’s CT-side performance. Eternal Fire was able to narrow the deficit slightly (7-10) in the second half thanks to another pistol triumph and following round conversion, but G2 quickly regained the lead thanks to pistols from Nemanja #huNter- Kova and m0NESY that detonated the B bombsite. From that moment, the European combine had no trouble finishing the map, and m0NESY continued to shine as he grabbed a 1v2 to place his team on match point before they won 16-9.

While G2 ran riot on the T-side, Nuke started out similarly one-sided and forced a third map despite Eternal’s Fire occasional round victories. This time around, Justin #jks Savage and hunter- took over the early phases of the map, but the 17-year-old moved up deeper into G2’s offensive strategy. Jks’ triple kill and 1v2 clutch were followed by m0NESY quad kill round, and the total supremacy persisted all the way to the halftime score of 11-4.

A pistol round victory for G2 appeared to place a seal on the situation, with economic dominance on the CT-side and total momentum in their advantage. A force-buy from Eternal Fire kept the Turkish team in the game, a victory they chained into two more rounds. However, once G2 had weapons in hand, they immediately resumed winning and increased their advantage to 14-7. HooXi’s team appeared to have a quick win, but Eternal Fire’s methodical and slow options allowed them to succeed, bringing the score all the way back to 14-12. HooXi defeated Yasin #xfl0ud Koc in a crucial 1v1 to eventually place his team on match point and victory.

Stay tuned

The masterclass of G2 will be put to test on Thursday at 19:30 when they take on Cloud9 in the upper bracket semi-final of Group A. The teams haven’t competed against each other yet since the IEM Road to Rio Europe RMR, where the Russian team won a best-of-one match on Mirage 16-13.