Natus Vincere won a tense match against Vitality in the ESL Pro League Grand Finals and became the third team in history to win the Intel Grand Slam (previous seasons were won by Astralis and Liquid). The amount of prize money NAVI will receive is $1 million dollars.
It took NAVI almost a year and a half to get to this title – the first of the four victories needed to win it came at IEM Katowice 2020, the last LAN event before the pandemic. The team has shown the ability to adapt to any format with one of the remaining three LAN tournament wins (IEM Cologne 2021) and two more – online (at DreamHack Masters Spring 2021 and ESL Pro League Season 14).
Interestingly, 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 inactive – his place was taken by a young cyber athlete Valery «B1T» Vakhovsky.
One more honorable title should be mentioned: according to the results of the ESL Pro League tournament, Alexander «s1mple» received the MVP award, which was his third consecutive and sixteenth in total.