BLAST season kicked off with one-sided victories in Copenhagen

Day 1 of the new BLAST season gave a glimpse of what is to come in 2024. Most notable was the very one-sided victory for Astralis against Falcons. Danny "zonic" Sørensen's men lost their map pick of Vertigo after a poor start on their CT-side. On Ancient Falcons never really got started and was kicked out of the server with a stunning 13-3 loss. Nicolai 'device' Reedtz did not even need to perform at his usual high level with several of his teammates delivering superbly on the server. Victor 'Staehr' Staehr left a good impression on Ancient, while Benjamin 'blameF' Bremer was a constant threat and nuisance to a shaky playing Falcons.

In the same group, Team Vitality started the year with a 13-0 win on Mirage against OG. The humiliation continued for a while on Inferno, before OG finally turned up on the server and won some rounds to deliver a respectable result losing 13-7. Mathieu 'ZywOo' Herbaut left the server with a 1-68 rating to start the year on a very high note.

In Group C, G2 destroyed Ninjas in Pyjamas 13-7, 13-2 on Vertigo and Anubis. It was not a good sight for the many Swedish Counter-Strike fans who could however rejoice themselves in the fact, that the only Swede on the NIP roster was the only player who delivered a good match for the Ninjas, as Fredrik 'REZ' Sterner went 25-25 in K-D. On the other side of the server Ilya 'm0NESY' Osipov did his best to live up to the praise of Nikola 'NiKo' Kovač that he got in an interview with Pley.gg before the event. The Russian AWP'er went 43-12 in K-D during the 35 rounds it took G2 to finish off NIP on the two maps.

The most interesting matchup in Group C was without a doubt the clash between NAVI and Complexity. Here NAVI managed to win Overpass 16-14 and could seal the win on their map pick of Anubis. Complexity fought back and had an 8-4 lead after the first half, but then everything fell apart. The Ukrainian duo Valeriy 'b1t' Vakhovskiy and Ihor 'w0nderful' Zhdanov smashed the defense of Complexity with the latter going 9-0! in K-D during the second half that NAVI won 9-0 to win the match.

Results of Day 1 from BLAST Premier Spring Groups:

Group A:

Astralis - Falcons 2-0
Vitality - OG 2-0

Group B:

NAVI - Complexity 2-0
G2 - Ninjas in Pyjamas 2-0

The winners and losers face each other today, where the losers of the lower bracket will have to go through the Spring Showdown tournament to book a ticket to the Spring Finals in London later this year.

Today's schedule: (CET)

12.00: G2 - NAVI
14.30: NIP - Complexity (Elimination match)
17.00: Vitality - Astralis
19.30: OG - Falcons (Elimination match)