Qualified: finals of ESL PUBG Masters

The marathon of collecting PGC points has just begun, and our PUBG team is fighting their way towards the first points of the season, in ESL PUBG Masters. Our team has qualified for the finals, which can lead to 200 points. We have had a chat with the team after the qualification, to check in and learn more about their strategies going forward.

PGC points: Point system in PUBG to qualify for the PGC (PUBG Global Championship).

Professional esports athletes do always spend time on improving, but also analyzing the previous games. Some of the games during PUBG ESL Masters were challenging for the team.

– I would use the word decent to describe our games. I feel like half of the games were pretty bad, and the other half was good. We will improve and learn from the experience by making our comms better, since that is the biggest issue we are facing right now. I would also like to highlight Beami's performance with mechanical skill that really showed in a couple of the games. The fights were instantly turned heavily to our favour by him making valuable solo play, says PUBG athlete  Paavo “PaG3” Vouttalien.

The new format in PUBG

PUBG corp. has changed their rules and format for professional tournaments. It is more important than ever to perform on the Top Tier tournaments, such as ESL PUBG Masters. The coach of our PUBG team, Oliver “Ball1n” Santasalo, was never doubting on the athletes´s performance:

– The team performance was ascending throughout the qualification games. It's always hard mentally for the players to play a little amount of games to qualify for an important event like ESL Finals. However, we were confident that we could get through to the Finals from the qualifier, and that's why our performance was getting better, game after game.

There are four possible tournaments to catch PGC points this season; ESL PUBG Masters x2, PCS 4 and PCS 5. That makes even more pressure for the athletes to perform during their few chances this season. The strategy is already set for the finals of ESL PUBG Masters.

– We have already identified most of the areas where we need to improve as a team, and also as in individuals. This week leading to the Finals, we are going to focus on improving our communication and that we have all the fundamentals done properly, without rushing them. We have been focusing even more on the team energy this season. We want to improve as a team to have the ability to reset well for the next game or keep the momentum on our side. I would describe our energy during these ESL qualifiers as cohesive. We had hard games, where we didn't have the luck on our side, but we also made mistakes leading to bad results. The most important thing is that we never gave up. Every time a new game started we were ready for it as a team.