After a gruelling 6 days of competition a champion has been crowned at the Six Invitational 2019 in Montreal, Canada for Rainbow Six: Siege. 16 teams from around the world have battled it out to try and take a slice of the $2 million USD prize pool, but in the end it was Team Empire that found themselves up against the reigning champions G2 Esports; formerly PENTA Sports – in the grand final match.
Starting off the best of 5 series we saw G2 Esports pick up where they left off last year, selecting Coastline as the first map to be played on. In what ended up being the longest map played in Pro League history, both teams went head-to-head in an epic showdown that lasted 22 rounds after going into overtime. Drawing 6-6 the match kicked into unlimited overtime where one team needed to best the other by going up by 2 match points. Ultimately G2 Esports held off Team Empire winning Coastline 12-10 in a thrilling first map.
This seemed to be where everything began to crumble for Team Empire as they couldn’t keep up any longer. The next map was Border, as chosen by Team Empire, however G2 Esports kept their momentum going by winning 7-4. Finally Bank was up next with G2 Esports demolishing Team Empire 7-1, which secured themselves an overall 3-0 win in the grand final series and being named the champions of the Six Invitational 2019.
In an Australian exclusive Stevivor spoke to G2 Esports’ coach Thomas “Shas[O]Udas” Lee, after their victory to find out what he was telling his players in that punishing overtime match on Coastline.
“We took a timeout to try and get a little bit of calm, we went into that game giving them a bit too much respect and also giving them too much space to play,” Lee told Stevivor. “That map overall was just a slugfest of aggression and determination, we needed to take that timeout to get our guys to slow things down.”
Once that map was over the momentum seemed to shift as G2 Esports took off and didn’t look back. Lee mentioned that the mind games began before they even started playing their first map.
“We messed around with them a bit in the banning phase, kind of like in a poker game,” Lee said. “They were surprised that we banned Consulate, I was expecting us to pick Border but they picked it thinking we were trying to trick them, so they played right into us in the map bans. As soon as we started racking up the rounds on Border I think that is when the momentum really shifted.”
Stevivor recently talked to Australia’s Fnatic before the event kicked off, who told us they had been practicing with G2 Esports in preparation for the event. Unfortunately Fnatic was knocked out of the top 8 by the other APAC team, Nora-Rengo, who ended up bowing out in the top 4. Both teams have performed very well during the last few major events with Fnatic and Nora-Rengo again landing a top 4 finish at the Pro League Season 8 finals in Rio. With the opportunity at hand we asked Lee how he sees APAC’s growth in the competition over the past 2 years.
“APAC has come really far. Last year I said that I agreed with Fabian [G2 Esports Captain], that APAC shouldn’t have been here purely because they were an underdeveloped region that didn’t have much exposure playing against other teams. But now they are basically up the top with everybody else, at the end of the day APAC is nothing to sleep on.”
As we wrapped up our chat with Lee, he told Stevivor how he had been working with 2 hours sleep each night the last couple of weeks, and that he was due for some much needed rest, but would also find some time to celebrate.
“For the last few weeks I’ve basically not been sleeping,” Lee said. “I’m going to have a little nap, and then start drinking some whiskey.”
G2 Esports walk away as the winners of the Six Invitational 2019 receiving $800,000 USD in prize money.
Luke Lawrie traveled to Montreal, Canada as a guest of Ubisoft to cover the Rainbow Six: Siege Invitational.
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