On December 13 at 12:00 EEST, in the opening match of BLAST Premier: World Final 2023 for CS2, Team Vitality will face off against Natus Vincere. In this article, Bo3.gg, along with James "BanKs" Banks, analyzes and makes a prediction about the outcome of this encounter.

Vitality's Form

Despite replacing Emil "Magisk" Reif with William "mezii" Merriman, Vitality's roster already looks like a trophy-farming machine. They have already won one - BLAST Premier: Fall Final 2023. It can be confidently said that this is just the beginning. Structurally, nothing in the team has changed, which plays into their hands, as other teams have undergone more significant changes. Dan "apEX" Madesclaire's squad approaches the upcoming tournament as the undisputed favorite.

NAVI's Form

Aleksandr "s1mple" Kostyliev's decision to go inactive shocked the entire Counter-Strike community. However, his replacement, Igor "w0nderful" Zhdanov, has already managed to make a great impression. The cyber athlete demonstrated one of the best debuts in NAVI's history. Unfortunately, neither Zhdanov nor Valeriy "b1t" Vakhovskiy's good form improved the team's results. Perhaps the team lacks self-confidence, or perhaps they are missing Ivan "iM" Mihai, who has yet to find his game after moving to NAVI.

Map Pool

Regarding the map pool of both teams, we definitely won't see Ancient and Vertigo. NAVI will likely try to pick Anubis, as they have an 86% win rate on it. It's also the only map better played by them than Vitality. The French club's players will probably choose between Overpass and Inferno. Both maps are strong for Vitality and relatively weak for NAVI.

Prediction by petr1k 

Vitality is a slight favorite in this match. At the start of the tournament, there could be an unexpected result. NAVI might prepare well for the match and find some weaknesses, but most likely Vitality will win. Despite replacing Magisk with mezii, they haven't really changed anything significantly, and NAVI is still in the process of rebuilding. Without s1mple, no matter how well w0nderful performs, NAVI lacks the X-factor that could consistently pull off insane rounds. From w0nderful, we can expect a stable performance and good numbers, but it's unlikely we'll see incredible highlights from him.

Oleksandr Petr1k Petryk

READ MORE: Prediction and analysis of the match between Cloud9 and ENCE in the group stage of BLAST Premier: World Final 2023