An unlucky grenade toss led to Astralis’ Nicolai “dev1ce” Reedtz’s shocking demise on Vertigo.
BLAST Premier’s matchup between Astralis and MIBR didn’t go exactly as planned for the Danish team at first. MIBR, with a completely fresh roster and seemingly little hope of even taking a map off Astralis, surprised everyone by taking the series to the full three maps. Although Astralis eventually took the match on the decider Inferno, Astralis AWPer dev1ce was on the unfortunate side of one of the rarest deaths possible in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.
Grenades are powerful weapons in CSGO when they explode in a player’s face, but they only do a single point of damage if they hit a player directly. In the match against MIBR, dev1ce experienced just that. On Vertigo, dev1ce quickly moved to support his teammate Emil “Magisk” Reif, who was stuck in CT after an aggressive mid rush by MIBR. After rotating through A connector, dev1ce took a high-explosive grenade to the face for his effort. But it wasn’t the HE grenade that sent him to the grave. Instead, the explosion put dev1ce on just a single point of health. Unfortunately for the Astralis AWPer, MIBR’s smoke grenade did the rest.
The smoke struck dev1ce milliseconds after the HE grenade inflicted massive damage and the single impact took dev1ce’s last point of HP and sent him to his grave. With bullets and flames seemingly all around CSGO maps at all times, the rare kill was both funny and frustrating for the star player. dev1ce peeked the middle angle much too wide, and if he had peeked slightly slower he might have missed the grenade and had a serious impact on the round. An AWP player with even a single point of health can be devastating, as G2’s Mathieu “ZywOo” Herbaut showed recently.
dev1ce got his revenge in the last map of the series, grabbing three kills with CSGO’s autosniper, two of which he found while completely blind. We’ll see if both MIBR and Astralis can keep up their impressive play as group three of BLAST Premier continues this week.
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