Four Games to Stop Shaking
For forty minutes, the first game belonged to Team Spirit. Nineteen kills and twelve assists for Illya “Yatoro” Mulyarchuk on Ursa, a 48-19 lead in kills: the kind of number that explains, better than any replay could, why Team Yandex hadn’t found their rhythm yet.
Then something shifts, and the scoreboard isn’t the first thing to show it. It’s the way three people, put together only weeks ago, start trusting each other inside a teamfight. At the 23-minute mark of game two, Ammar “ATF” Assaf takes his Timbersaw into a fight that will stretch the map out to 52 minutes, and somewhere in there Alimzhan “Watson” Islambekov and Ilya “CHIRA_JUNIOR” Chirtsov find their footing too.
By game three, there’s no room left for doubt. Watson closes it out with 14 kills and 14 assists on Nature’s Prophet, a perfect scorecard in the plainest sense of the word, and Yandex take the map in 48 minutes. This is the point where the series stops being a contest and turns into an execution.
The last game runs 56 minutes. Watson finishes with 19 kills and 14 assists, ATF with 13 and 22, and the series closes 3-1, Yandex ahead 51-37 on kills across the whole match.
Underneath the numbers there’s a slower story. ATF joined the roster after Team Falcons left the scene, one piece of the larger reshuffling that followed The International 2026. Building trust in a few weeks, against an opponent walking in as the reigning TI champion, was never only about mechanics.
Spirit, who still wear that TI title whether they’re playing like it or not, leave Malta with $135,000 and second place. Yandex take $270,000 and a second BLAST title, their first since Slam VII, the second major of a season that started with PGL Wallachia in late September.
Next time they meet, some of that trust will need proving all over again.
Adrian Kovacs