Second Half

Offense: NiP
Defense: Astralis

Heaton really got NiP rolling in the second half. NiP started off scouting out the map in the banana, halls and middle, making sure that Astralis did not do anything out of the ordinary for their defensive pistol. Although Astralis had a setup stacking the spawn side of middle, NiP would never run into it. NiP decided to take over the B bombsite and it was just all about Heaton. He got the entry kill, and then the rest Nip was dropping like flies. It seemed as though Astralis had this round in the bag. Then HeatoN was just all headshots. He ended up taking out four to win the round.



Astralis had a lot of strong comeback tendencies, but just could not pull through. NiP made a lot of big mistakes during this half. The first mistake I saw, that didn't really affect them too much but made for close rounds, was their fakes to the A bombsite. The way they would fake bombsite A would be sending the bomber and one other player to hold the banana while two would fake middle and one would fake halls and they would rally up back at banana to smoke and flash the site. I saw this tactic not work a couple times, because of two factors. The first round they attempted this, the two players at banana flashed and smoked the bombsite very early, before the rest of the team was not even at banana yet. This caused Astralis to realize this fake was very possible for later rounds and it caused them not to rotate from A nearly as much as Nip wanted them to.

One round I just wanted to slap all of Nip in the back of the heads. The situation saw Astralis saving two colts from the previous round (Astralis knew they were close to losing and saved these two guns in a two on three situation, which I think was a little irrational). NiP decided they were going to slowly work B and find out if the stack was at this bombsite. NiP did find out that Astralis had stacked at B, because Astralis tossed three or four HE's out into the banana. NiP decided to take their chances at B and they got absolutely rolled by Astralis, because they were baiting their three pistols and the colts just mowed them down. Very sloppy play by NiP.

What I really noticed about Astralis is their raw skill that most of the players possess. I remember watching most of these guys playing against 3D at WCG 2004 and you never knew what to expect from them (such as tihOp winning a one on three as offense against 3D with the bomb dropped). In this match we saw the same factors arise. During the first eco round, Astralis was able take down four of NiP's players and all the Astralis had were USP's without armor. They were also getting multi-kills left and right once they had colts in their hands. If it weren't for this they would have lost the next half 7-0. NiP made little to no mistakes upon bombsite entry, but Astralis was just all over them.



This was a great match, but NiP was able to pull through in a very close 16-10. Now NiP is getting ready to play their Swedish rivalry SK.



Stay tuned to GotFrag for a special versus article between Karpov and I; SK vs. NiP... Karpov vs. Bootman.