The first day of the ESL Pro League Season 18 playoffs will begin tomorrow, where the Ukrainian organization Monte and Swedish Fnatic will meet! This is their first meeting after four months of separation. But who is destined to win? Especially for bo3.gg readers we have made our prediction for this match purely using statistical data, as well as past matches of the teams!
Form of the teams
Let's face it, Fnatic's form during the group stage looked a bit better than Monte's. Even if we just remember that Fnatic entered the tournament from the bottom of the bracket, while Monte entered the tournament from the last chance bracket.
That said, the numbers say that the teams are playing on par. And that's just that Fnatic's first kill rate is 10% higher than Monte's. But that's too small a difference to draw any conclusions from.
Pool of maps
Of course, we need to figure out what maps the teams are expected to play.
Let's immediately discard Mirage and Inferno, as they are permobans for Fnatic and Monte respectively.
Next we should expect Overpass or Ancient from Monte, as the team has some advantage.
But we should expect Nuke or Anubis from Fnatic, as they look a bit stronger there.
That leaves only Vertigo, where the teams look equally bad.
So we bet that there will be three hot maps, but still Fnatic look stronger on paper and will be able to beat Monte, because they are going through a bad time. Just by looking at their recent history.
The playoff bracket looks like this:
EPL S18 takes place from August 30 to October 1 in Malta. Teams play for a prize pool of $850k. The champion will also get slots to BLAST Premier: World Final 2023 and IEM Katowice 2024. You can follow the schedule and results of the tournament at the link.
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