Vitality and Valiance pick up victories at Europe Minor

Vitality and Valiance are through to the Group A winners' match after defeating OpTic and mousesports, respectively.

The first match of the Europe Minor kicked off on Dust2, with OpTic winning their CT pistol on the back of a successful 3v4 retake on A. Vitality did not back down, however, and immediately countered the Danes with a force-buy, which inspired them to a 7-2 lead.

OpTic then finally got back on the board, in part thanks to René "cajunb" Borg's triple-kill with a saved AWP, and followed that up with one more round, making it 4-7. From that moment, both teams traded rounds back-to-back, meaning that Vitality would bag a 9-6 lead by half-time.

After picking up their CT pistol, Vitality made light work of OpTic, losing just the first gun round before hitting match-point, 15-7. Marco "Snappi" Pfeiffer's men responded with their eighth round, but it was in vain, though, as Mathieu "ZywOo" Herbaut and Dan "apEX" Madesclaire, with nothing but Deagles, closed out the map with a triple and a double-kill, respectively.

Meanwhile, mousesports and Valiance battled it out on Mirage, where the latter team picked up their CT pistol thanks to doubles from Nemanja "nexa" Isaković and Nemanja "huNter-" Kovač. Chris "chrisJ" de Jong's side responded well thanks to two consecutive quad-kills from the 28-year old, eventually making it 3-1 in their favour.

The match quickly proved to be a challenging job for the fourth best team in the world, however, as Valiance constantly stopped mousesports from breaking through the defence, taking a 7-3 lead. Tomáš "oskar" Šťastný's troops then came back to life, and lost only one more round to bring the gap to a sole round by half-time.

In the second half, mousesports were helpless, as Valiance went on to take a 13-8 lead. mouz won the next round, but they were immediately reset by nexa's men, who were able to hit match-point. Despite their opponents trying to mount a comeback, Valiance remained calm and collected to finish off the clash in the last round of regulation.