Montreal 2020
The Six Invitational is widely recognized by Rainbow Six fans as the world championship of our favorite game. It is a massive event, featuring a 4 team Creator tournament, 3 days of live matches, and a panel for the game developers to give a road map of the updates and changes coming to the game over the next two years. Rainbow is heading into it’s fifth year, and as a fan, the Grand Final may have been the perfect end to year four and beginning to year five.
Beginning with 16 teams, only 8 make it to the LAN event and get to play in the double elimination, best of three maps, tournament in front of the sold out Montreal crowd. It is not often that a team who loses on the first day makes it very far, and after a pretty decisive loss to Team SoloMid, including getting rolled 7-3 on Kafe, Latin American team Ninjas in Pyjamas were faced with a Herculean task to over come the rest of the pool and earn their way into the Grand Final. But, there is something to be said for experience, and having players like Kamikaze and Muzi, who have been a part of Pro-League since it started half a decade ago, can help a team overcome adversity. The darling of the tournament was young-gun Pino, who seemed to quarterback some of the most deadly attacking rounds I’ve ever seen. NIP established long angles and turned objective after objective into a shit show of crossfire, all while constantly adjusting, and successfully countering every obstacles thrown their way. No map was this more effective than Border. The Ninjas crushed teams a combined 21-9 on Border heading into the Grand Final.
Space Station Gaming is a weird team. They have some of the best players in the world, all filling separate rolls. Fragging-Machines ,Fultz and Rampy, Cool-handed clutch masters, ThinkingNade and Bosco, and maybe the biggest name in Rainbow Pro-League, Canadian, create a team that should be a near lock for every Major tournament. But even with that impressive roster, SSG has been putting out a pretty middle-of-the-road performance on the North American servers. They currently sit Third, behind DarkZero and TSM, but are coming off a 5th place finish in seasons 9 and 10. They have the talent, but that talent seems to have trouble showing up on a consistent basis. SSG looked like the War-machine it is at the US Major in a Vegas, winning without losing a single map. But, that seems to be the theme for the Astronauts, they show up on the biggest stages, and struggle to compete week to week. The stages don’t get much bigger than the Six Invitational, and Rampy exploded all weekend, rightful earning his spot as the top ranked player leading up to the final. SSG powered through MIBR and DarkZero in tournament play. After losing the first map of the semi-final to TSM on Bank, Space Station came back to crush them 7-1 on coastline and finally win 8-6 in overtime on Kafe.
Having not lost a match, SSG was afforded a 1-0 map lead on NIP before the match even began. A match that opened old-wounds for Canadian as Space Station won only 5 rounds through 2 maps, conceding the map lead they had worked so hard all weekend to earn. The losses came on Villa, a map SSG had won twice through the tournament, and Pino’s playground, Boarder. I cannot stress how grim things looked for SSG after dropping those first two maps. Memories of Paris undoubtably swimming through the head of their Capitan as it seemed a third straight Invitational would slip through Canadians hands. But, map three was Clubhouse, and if you missed the casters saying it about a zillion times, you DO NOT take Space Station to Clubhouse.
After going down 4-0 however the SSG spirit seemed to be broken, and that spiral unstoppable. Then, ThinkingNade clutched a round. Next Fultz denied a last second plant to make the score 4-2. SpaceStation had a spark, and rode that to winning the next 7/8 rounds giving us a map 5, winner take all, on Bank… and SSG picked up right where they left off. The rounds seemed to steam by as SSG constantly forced Pino and Muzi into hard clutch situations. Finally, a Canadian plant on round 11 was the last straw and the Astronauts became the first NA team to win the Six Invitational since Continuum in 2017. In the victory, Bosco becomes the first and probably only player we will ever see to win the Six on both Xbox and PC, having won in 2017, the only time their was a console division to the tournament. Fultz, Rampy and ThinkingNade win their first Invitational, and Canadian seems to have finally put to rest the ghosts of Invitational past, which have seemed to haunt him. Suck on that Pengu, fucking dweeb. For more on Canadians Invitational related struggles, I put a link at the bottom to a video by theScore, fittingly titled “The Greatest Choke in Esports History Actually Happened Twice.”
Where does the leave NIP? Well, they are still first in LATAM, and I don’t think that this performance really showed a massive gap in their team. Muzi and Julio seemed to fade down the stretch, but at the end of the day they were an overmatched underdog playing against a team with basically a home crowd. Ninjas made history, becoming the first Latin American team to reach the finals, and with Pino seeming to just start to hit stride, the future is bright for NIP in a tight division. A quarter of the players at the 2020 Invitational were from Brazil, and with a region including Team Liquid and gaming giant FaZe Clan, the competition level is only getting better and better in LATAM, it’s no surprise to see Latin teams go deeper into major tournaments.
With a Pro league on break till late March for the Europe and Americas servers, only APAC will be in action early Wednesday morning. I know very little on APAC, time differences making it hard to watch most times, but I’m excited to see more play. Pro-League can get tiring week after week, but hot off the heels of the Six, and with only 5 match days left, the race is on between Giants and Qconfirm. Both enter Match day 9 tied at 24 points, and with only 2 weeks left before their head-to-head matchup, every point matters.