On October 16, 2023 the first major tournament on CS2 will start — Intel Extreme Masters Sydney 2023! And especially for you we will make predictions for the matches of this tournament.

Today we have a match of Natus Vincere vs Apeks, who are in Group A of the championship. The match will take place at 03:00 Kiev on October 16, 2023.

Form of the teams

Apeks after the last CS:GO major are trying hard to gain a foothold in the Tier-1 scene, but so far with the updated roster they have not succeeded.

Last time NAVI played against Apeks at ESL Pro League Season 18 and then "born to win" took out their opponents with a score of 2:0 on maps. Moreover, Apeks managed to win only 12 rounds in two maps. Which means they are not a serious opponent for NAVI.

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But the two teams are equal in individual stats. The only thing is that Apeks is superior by 2% in the number of kills and 3% in the number of first kills in a round.

But, this is already a very small difference, which does not really affect anything.

Map Pool

Now it's time to figure out the maps for this confrontation.

NAVI are full-fledged Vertigo haters, because out of 2051 maps played in the history of the organization in CS:GO the team has played Vertigo only ONE time!

Apeks, on the other hand, have been permobanning Nuke lately. We risk to assume that nothing will change in this match.

So far, Natus Vicere is perfectly able to play Anubis. And they beat the same Apeks 24 years ago with a score of 16:7.

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For Apeks, Overpass would be a more or less comfortable map, as they recently outplayed FORZE, ALTERNATE aTTaX and Imperial Esports.

For an appetizer, teams should keep something like Inferno or Mirage as desert maps play a big role in the map pool for these teams.

But, an important point about Inferno. The map is new and it's not a fact that teams will be ready to play it at the tournament. So we are more inclined towards Mirage.

Results

Another easy game for Natus Vincere, which they should win 2-0 on the maps as they just recently made it to the ESL Pro League finals, which took over a month to complete.

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The situation in the groups in the championship at the moment look like this:

Intel Extreme Masters Sydney 2023 is the first CS2 tournament that takes place in LAN format in Sydney from October 16-22, 2023. The championship has a prize pool of $250,000 and a total of 16 teams are participating in the tournament.