This article is part of our PUBG series.
While Team Liquid seemed to be miles ahead of the competition on the first two days of StarSeries i-League 2018, the Europeans looked incredibly human on Day 3. With a muddled showing from Liquid, the rest of the field has managed to close the gap to make things very interesting going into the final day.
Competition has finally started to heat up
After a fairly lopsided first couple days of competition, the field has finally started to catch up, and surpass in FaZe's case, with Team Liquid. That's right, despite coming into the day with a 325 lead over FaZe, Liquid has now fallen into second place. While FaZe only had one win on Saturday, they also had a 3rd place and 5th place finish to round out the day. FaZe's consistency has simply been on another level during this whole tournament. To put it in perspective, in the 15 games played thus far, they've placed outside the top-6 just three times, adding up to them finally overtaking Liquid going into the final day. Granted, they're only up by 19 points, but that just means that Sunday's matches just became all the more important.
Moving onto non-FaZe Clan/Team Liquid discussion, Tempo Storm continued its surge with yet another strong showing on Day 3. After finishing Day 1 in 12th place, Tempo has been on an absolute tear, with three wins in the last eight games. Day 3 was by far their best of all, finishing with two chicken dinners on the day to catapult them all the way from 5th overall at the end of Day 2 to 3rd going into the final day. They still might be trailing second-place Team Liquid by over 400 points, but Tempo outscored Liquid by almost 600 points and FaZe by over 200 on Day 3. If Tempo can pull out a couple more chicken dinners on Sunday, they could very well leapfrog both European squads to take the title.
Everything below Tempo is still a bit of a muddled mess. The IEM Katowice champions, AVANGAR, had a solid day to maintain top-6 status. Vitality had a bit of a rough 7th place showing on the day to slip from 3rd overall to 4th. Four Angry Men picked up a chicken dinner to move from 10th to 7th going into the final day. But still, even Vitality's 4th place spot is lagging almost 600 points behind FaZe. I would be very surprised to see anyone other than FaZe, Liquid, or Tempo take home the top spot on Sunday.
Liquid freezes on Day 3
I'd be remiss if I didn't get out of here without touching on the incredibly poor day Team Liquid had on Saturday. Quite frankly, this looked like a completely different team from the one that ran roughshod over the competition on Thursday and Friday. After never placing below 11th on the first two days, Liquid finished 13th, 9th, 7th, 10th, and 9th on Saturday. Since they kept getting bounced so early, they added in just 19 kills on the day. That was a far cry from the 64 and 49 Liquid posted on the first two days of competition.
For some reason, Liquid seemed to lose all aggression from Day 2 to Day 3. While it's true that sometimes that's just the way of Battle Royales due to the RNG nature of loot drops and the like, it was still surprising to see Liquid struggle so heavily on Saturday. This was especially true when you compare this muddled performance to the continued consistency of FaZe Clan. Whatever the problem was, Liquid has not squandered away its entire lead and will need to play lights out on Sunday to salvage its tournament run in Kiev.
The final day of StarSeries i-League 2018 will kick off at 8 a.m. ET with another third-person perspective that will be immediately followed by the first of the final five matches at 9 a.m. ET.
