In the BLAST Premier World Finals 2021, Natus Vincere finally proved its right to be called the best team of 2021, winning the match against Gambit. For NAVI, this is the eighth victory in a major tournament over the past year. It is noteworthy that “born to win” The team had to advance to the finals the hard way: after an unexpected loss to Liquid in the opening match of the playoffs, the team needed to win several matches in a row to reach the grand final from the lower bracket of the tournament. Thus, Natus Vincere consistently won victories over Heroic, G2, Liquid and Vitality.
The final match between NAVI and Gambit began with the latter’s victory on Mirage. However, on the next map (Ancient) Natus Vincere was able to achieve an advantage. The fate of the match was decided on Inferno, and here NAVI’s advantage turned out to be overwhelming, and their opponents managed to win only a few rounds (16 - 6).
Alexander “s1mple” was recognized as the best player of the tournament. Kostylev, who showed an average rating of 1.42 (and 1.62 in the final match). Based on this and other static indicators, s1mple beat two other outstanding players of the tournament – Matthew "ZywOo" Erbo from Vitality and Nikola "NiKo" Kovacs from G2. This is Kostylev’s eighth MVP title in 2021. Thus, he broke Nikolai’s “device” record. Ridets, who received this title seven times in 2018 and repeated his achievement in terms of the total number of MVP medals. We can expect that s1mple will soon surpass him in this indicator as well.
