This article is part of our PUBG series.
Can anyone stop Team Liquid? Two days into StarSeries i-League 2018 and the answer seems to be a resounding "no." Liquid still leads the pack by a sizeable margin, and shows no signs of stopping. FaZe Clan, however, continues to be within striking distance going into the final two days.
The kills just keep piling up for Team Liquid
There was a bit of good news for the rest of pack coming out of Day 2, as Liquid's lead in the standings shrunk. The bad news, however, is that it only shrunk by 37 points to 325. While Liquid only won a single game on the day, they are still racking up kills, pulling in 64 kills on Day 1, before adding on 49 during Day 2 action for a total of 113 in just two days. Yeah, that's an average of over 11 kills per game. It's these immense amount of kills that is truly keeping Liquid ahead of the pack. They may have picked up a win in the fourth game of the day, but fell short in the game placings, finishing just 7th, 11th, 5th, and 2nd outside of that win. As such, they're placement points sit at 1595, just 25 points ahead of FaZe's 1570. They own a 300-point lead in the kill column to keep a strong hold of their lead, though, so Liquid's dominance is still real.
At the forefront of the Liquid attack is Jim "jeemzz" Eliassen, who is absolutely shredding the competition. Even in the opening game where his team came in 7th, he put up a whopping eight of his teams 11 kills in the game. To to be outdone by himself, he poured on 1263 damage during their chicken dinner, marking the first time a player had gone over 1000 damage in a game this tournament. With Liquid's strategy of a straight up blitzkrieg, it's a wonder who will be able to slow them down on the final two days.
The rest of the pack struggle to keep up
While Team Liquid is in a category of their own in Kiev, FaZe Clan continues to operate in their own space above the other 14 teams. They're down a total of 325 points to Liquid, but they're also 501 points above the 3rd place, Team Vitality. In terms of chasing Liquid, they may be in a 300-point hole in the kill department, but they're managing to keep up with Liquid stride-for-stride in terms of placement scores. While FaZe has only picked up a single chicken dinner all tournament, compared to the whopping four of Liquid, they're only behind by 20 points in terms of placements. If they can manage to win a couple more games while hoping that Liquid stops slaying out, a tournament win could certainly be on their horizons.
By far the biggest surprise of the day, however, was Tempo Storm. After placing above 11th just once on Day 1, ending 12th place overall, Tempo Storm were only out of the top-6 in one game on Friday. They even picked up a chicken dinner in Game 3 to add to their impressive Day 2 totals. The strong outing has managed to pull them all the way out of the basement and into 5th place going into the third day of competition. Right above Tempo is Cloud9, who also managed a chicken dinner on Friday, to give North America a solid showing thus far.
Another team that has pulled themselves together after a rough Day 1 was AVANGAR. The IEM Katowice champions picked up a chicken dinner in the second game of the day, while adding in a 3rd and 4th place showing in the third and fifth games of the day, respectively. That added up to a jump from 11th to 6th overall at the end of Day 2.
With two days of competition left, we know that Liquid and FaZe seem to miles above the competition. Beyond that, we don't know much else but, as we've seen from Tempo Storm and AVANGAR, a few solid finishes are enough to leapfrog some teams. At the end of the day, though, if no one can stop Liquid from decimating the competition in terms of kills, nothing else will matter.
