The final lineup of participants in the Champions stage has been determined at PGL Major Stockholm. In the coming days, eight teams will play playoff matches at the Avicii Arena stadium, which will be the first major eSports event in the presence of spectators since the start of the pandemic.
The Champions Stage will begin with a match between Heroic and Virtus.pro, which will take place on Thursday. The second game of the day will be a confrontation between G2 and NIP, the last team to qualify for the playoffs. Many fans of the game are looking forward to Friday's matches, in which two more teams from the CIS will appear. Gambit will fight for reaching the semifinals with the Brazilian FURIA, and Natus Vincere – against the French Vitality. Thus, in the first matches of the playoffs, none of the three contenders for the championship from the CIS will have to play against each other, which means that the likelihood that one of them will advance to the final stage increases.
It is interesting that teams that had previously proven themselves mainly in online tournaments during the pandemic, such as Gambit and Heroic, made it to the final part of the major. Thus, the repeated assumptions that they could not be as successful in the LAN format turned out to be groundless.
