The first pancake is always lumpy - NAVI lost their first match in the group stage of IEM Cologne 2023.

Today, the Ukrainian organization Natus Vincere played their first match in the group stage of Intel Extreme Masters Cologne 2023.

Unfortunately, or by the law of those "born to win", they lost their first match to the MOUZ team with a score of 0:2.

How did the match go?

NAVI were trounced. The first map of the confrontation was Ancient (picked by team MOUZ). The mice just ran over NAVI with a score of 16:9.

And no matter how hard the new rifler of the team, Justinas “jL” Lekavicius, who shot more than captain Aleksi “Aleksib” Virolainen and Ivan “iM” Mihai, it still was not possible to win the map.

The next map was the Overpass (picked by team Natus Vincere). Here, things went a bit better for "born to win", but they still lost with a score of 12:16.

MOUZ rifler David "frozen" Čerňanský took home the MVP award, as his rating after 2 maps equaled an astounding 7.1 points!

What's next? 

Natus Vincere fell into the last chance bracket, where there will be a complete mess. The bracket already includes Astralis, as well as the losing teams of these matches: Ninjas in Pyjamas/FaZe Clan and Vitality/OG.

To clarify immediately, for our boys to win the tournament, they will have to win 6 matches in a row!

As for MOUZ, things are better, but still not rosy. Although they advanced, their next opponent will be the winner of the Vitality/OG pair.

In theory, this tells us that NAVI will still be able to play a rematch against the mice.

IEM Cologne 2023 takes place from July 26 to August 6. Teams are fighting for a prize pool of one million dollars and a quota for IEM Katowice 2024.