- The team takes home a prize of $400 000 while ENCE leaves the tournament with $180 000
- Vitality’s AWPer Mathieu “ZywOo” Herbaut was named MVP of the tournament
- The match was intense with Vitality making a huge comeback after a disastrous fort map
Vitality secured their third trophy in the last few months by defeating ENCE 2-1 to win the top spot at the Gamers8 tournament.
Vitality Win Gamers8
If you’ve tuned in to the finals of Gamers8 just after the conclusion of the first map, you could be forgiven if you thought ENCE would quickly wipe the floor with Vitality to claim the title. However, the exact opposite happened as the majority French roster slowly ground down ENCE’s onslaught on the second map and eventually turned the tides of the game. This eventually lead to Vitality winning the match, lifting the Gamers8 trophy above their heads, and taking home a handsome prize of $400 000.
In the process, Vitality’s AWPer Mathieu “ZywOo” Herbaut was named MVP of the tournament by HLTV and 1xBet. The young CS:GO player had formidable opposition for the title in the face of Paweł “dycha” Dycha and Alvaro “SunPayus” Garcia. However, the fact that Vitality endured to the last match helped ZywOo gain enough of an advantage to be named MVP of the event.
It should be noted that the statistics from the tournament are a bit skewed as some players sit atop categories only having played two or three maps. Despite that, the player scored impressively, finishing Gamers8 with the highest K-D Differential (+55) and total opening kills (55), second-highest KAST (78.5%), and was third overall for event rating with a 1.26. This is ZywOo’s 16th career MVP award and his third in 2023, having previously been crowned MVP at the BLAST Paris Major and IEM Rio 2023.
How Did the Match Go?
ENCE absolutely dominated Vitality in every aspect on the fort map, Annubis, claiming it with 16-7 rounds. Every single member of the team produced highlight-worthy moments and Vitality was simply unable to build a cohesive response during the entire map. However, it seems that ENCE had done all their tricks on Anubis and had none left for the other maps, as Mirage, the second one, was an absolutely different story.
It was Vitality’s choice, which probably saved them from a 0-2 defeat at the hand of their opponents. The majority French team started Mirage much better this time, but the whole map was still a slugfest as both squads traded rounds. But by the end of the fort half, Vitality managed to scrape a stable advantage of 9-6. The match continued following a lengthy technical break, but eventually Vitality, in large part thanks to ZywOo and Shahar “flameZ” Shushan’s multi-kills, were able to wrap up the map with a 16-12.
It all came down to the decider of Nuke, where Vitality quickly gained the lead, taking five rounds before ENCE could respond. Once they did, however, they managed to quickly catch up and even end the first half of the map with a tiny 8-7 lead.
However, it seems that by this point ENCE’s fuel tank had all but dried up, as the team was not able to maintain this lead. Vitality quickly brushed that aside and gained round after round quickly wrapping things up with a dominating 16-9 result to win the match 2-1 and lift the first-place trophy above their heads.
