Natus Vincere won a tense match with Vitality in the ESL Pro League grand finals and became the third team in history to win the Intel Grand Slam (Astralis and Liquid were winners in previous seasons). The amount of prize money that NAVI will receive is $1 million.
It took NAVI almost a year and a half to achieve this title – the first of the four wins needed to get it came at IEM Katowice 2020, the last LAN event before the pandemic. The team demonstrated the ability to masterfully adapt to any format, winning one of the remaining three victories at the LAN tournament (IEM Cologne 2021), and two more – online (at DreamHack Masters Spring 2021 and at ESL Pro League Season 14).
It’s interesting that part of the prize money will go to Egor “flamie” Vasiliev, who was in NAVI at IEM Katowice 2020, but then began to appear less and less often in the main roster and was eventually transferred to inactivity – his place was taken by the young cybersportsman Valery “B1T” Vakhovsky.
It is impossible not to mention another honorary title: according to the results of the ESL Pro League tournament, Alexander “s1mple” received the MVP award, which was his third in a row and sixteenth in total.
