ESL One Los Angeles European/CIS League grand finals – OG versus Virtus.Pro

The ESL One Los Angeles European/CIS League grand finals took place last night, 19 April 2020, with Virtus.Pro and OG going head-to-head. Despite every disadvantage you can think of from having two offlane players, to high latency on their PO1 carry, OG managed to claw their way back from the lower bracket to face a full-force Virtus.Pro squad. Here’s what went down in the grand finals.

ESL One Los Angeles Grand Finals

With Syed Sumail “SumaiL” Hassan on high latency, and OG playing with two offlaners, not many Dota 2 esports fans backed the two-time TI winning champions.

In the first game, Virtus.Pro ran over OG, and it looked like the BO5 grand finals would easily go 3-0 in favour of VP. However, OG didn’t go down without a fight. In fact, the team fought back in spectacular fashion, with their “run-at-you” Dota, OG evened up the series in the second match, with SumaiL‘s Ember Spirit destroying VP.

The third game saw OG continue with their pressure, picking a fast-paced draft while giving SumaiL’s Morphling the space he needed to become, for a lack of a better term, “too big to fail”, as he went 16/2/4.

After two consecutive wins, OG was now on match point, one game away from taking the ESL One Los Angeles European/CIS League crown. Virtus.Pro,  however, didn’t just lay down and give up. Instead, the team fought back, stomping OG down in the fourth game on the back of Vladimir “No[o]ne” Minenko’s Templar Assassin.

Virtus.Pro managed to tie up the grand final 2-2, taking it to a fifth and final game. All the other games in the grand final were relatively one-sided stomps, but the fifth game finally delivered some fantastic Dota we’ve been looking for.

The fifth game went over 40 minutes long, with no clear winner for most of the game. In the end, however, Virtus.Pro, with their excellent support duo, simply wouldn’t die. No[o]ne blew OG’s backline up with Storm Spirit, and OG’s ancient finally fell, giving Virtus.Pro the ESL One Los Angeles European/CIS League victory.

With the win, Virtus.Pro claimed the first-place prize of $60,000. Despite OG losing in the grand final, the team looks incredibly strong, especially with all the issues, from having to use stand-ins to high latency on SumaiL.

Cash the entire grand final on the ESL Dota 2 YouTube channel.

Main image via Epicenter