Natus Vincere left the IEM Katowice championship after suffering a defeat to Gambit in the semifinals. Commenting on the incident Alexander «s1mple» Kostylev mentioned that the reason for the loss was the frequent mistakes that players made at the beginning. Because of this, the team felt insecure and let the initiative slip away. Sniper believes that the defeat by Gambit in the end can be called deserved.
The team coach compared the performance at IEM Katowice with the failure at ESL One Cologne in 2020 – where the team also showed an unexpectedly low level, ending up at the end of the competition at the bottom of the top ten.
Several analysts linked the loss to NAVI with the unfortunate choice of map. In particular, Mikhail «Kane» Blagin, who coached Natus Vincere in the past, noted that Natus Vincere as a whole lacked maps on which the team would feel most confident. While they are capable of performing perfectly on Nuke, they don't have another map where they would perform as well yet, and that could turn out to be a failure. Daniel «Zeus» Teslenko was surprised by the fact that the team chose Train, although it was known that playing on this map – is a strong point of Gambit Esports.
Thus, Gambit managed to advance to the grand finals, where they will face Virtus.pro.