In the BLAST Premier World Finals 2021, Natus Vincere finally proved their right to be called the best team of 2021 by winning against Gambit. For NAVI, this is the eighth major tournament win in the past year. It is noteworthy that «born to win» 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 advance to the grand finals from the lower set of the tournament. Thus, Natus Vincere has consecutive victories over Heroic, G2, Liquid and Vitality.
The final match of NAVI vs. Gambit started with the victory of the latter on Mirage. However, on the next map (Ancient), Natus Vincere was able to gain an advantage. The fate of the match was decided on Inferno, and here the advantage of NAVI was overwhelming, and their opponents managed to win back only a few rounds (16 – 6).
The best player of the tournament was recognized Alexander «s1mple» Kostylev, who showed an average rating of 1.42 (and 1.62 in the final match). In this and other stats, s1mple beat out two other outstanding players in the tournament – Matthew «ZywOo» Erbo from Vitality and Nikola «NiKo» Kovacs from G2. For Kostylev, this is his eighth MVP title in 2021. He thus broke the record of Nikolai «device» Ridz, who won the title seven times in 2018 and repeated his same achievement of total MVP medals. We can expect s1mple to surpass it soon as well.