Pinnacle Cup Championship ended with an all-Danish derby in a long-awaited first LAN title between Heroic and Astralis.
The $250,000 tournament took place in Lund, Sweden with a GSL-style group stage, with the opening matchups played in best-of-ones and the remainder in best-of-threes.
The tournament saw a much anticipated match-up between the two Danish giants, Heroic which was on its rise, and Astralis which was in its glorious fall.
Who won and took the $150,000 winner’s check home, let’s find out:
Heroic takes out BIG in Pinnacle Cup Championship Semi Finals
The burden was on Heroic to win a LAN event where they were the favourites, especially in the shadow of Cloud9, another team who came of age during the online era, and had just won the IEM Dallas trophy.
Despite not having any LAN championships to their name, the current Heroic squad entered the Pinnacle Cup Championship as the clear favourites, being the only top 10 team in the field despite a decreasing performance since the end of May. The Danes, who have dropped from fourth to ninth position in the standings since then, were looking to triumph against a group of teams that are all dealing with their own set of challenges.
They only needed to look at Cloud9 for inspiration, who surpassed the ones such as FaZe, BIG and ENCE at IEM Dallas:
In a two-map series, Heroic defeated BIG in the Pinnacle Cup Championship consolidation final, securing a spot in the grand final. They initially defeated their opponents in an overtime game on Mirage, before moving on to their preferred map, Overpass, where they won with a more comfortable 16-10 score.
That qualified them for the grand final versus Astralis. The domestic contest has turned into a spitting contest in recent weeks, with captains from both teams arguing on social media.
Pinnacle Cup Championship Grand Final: Astralis vs. Heroic
It was a highly anticipated showdown between the two best Danish teams, who had last met in a group of death in the group stage match at ESL Pro League Season 15 that saw Heroic barely winning after three close maps, and between whom tension had been building for months, with the two sides spraying bullets at each other in person and in interviews.
The hate and rivalry were real.
After a comfortable victory, Casper "cadiaN" Moller and his teammates confirmed their supremacy as their country's finest team at the moment, gaining a long-awaited LAN championship and bragging rights for months to come — or at least until the two rivals meet again.
Heroic has won the Pinnacle Cup Championship in Lund, Sweden, after a quick victory over Astralis in an all-Danish derby. Heroic taking home the $150,000 first-place prize.
Heroic’s CadiaN thought that his team still had some issues to polish to reach peak performance and had this to say about his team’s performance: "Decision making for sure, and communication," he said. "When the pressure got to us before sometimes, people would communicate less or not make plans, and now I have been saying 'let's rather make a shit plan and follow it, then we can learn from it, than not making a plan.' I can't make every plan."
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