Finnish Counter-Strike team ENCE secured Dreamhack Winter title after a 2-0 win over Bravado Gaming. The team has looked strong and has intermittently strong performances. They won the Starseries & I-League Season 6 in October and now they add another title. With Dreamhack Winter 2018 firmly under their belt, we can say that ENCE is quickly climbing up the ranks of Tier two teams.
This team has a great combination of young firepower and the veteran experience from Allu. And yet, we constantly see Allu play his own game, with the right mixture of aggression and firepower. In the Grand finals against Bravado Gaming, Allu was totally free throughout the maps. The amount of Space and respect that the AWPer commanded was a testimony to his impact on the game.

The first map was ENCE’s map pick, Train. Starting on the CT side, Bravado was never able to build up a stable economy. Their inability to use multiple grenades and smokes meant that the team was never comfortable with their buy. The ended the first half with a 5-10 scoreline, which is quite bad on the CT side. The entire ENCE roster was performing well with Allu constantly taking aggressive peeks and rattling the slow methodical Bravado offence. Bravado only managed 4 more rounds in the second half and lost ENCE’s map pick with a score of 16-9
The Second map was a disaster for the team.

Bravado chose Inferno as their map pick and it could not have gone any worse. The team wanted to have a much better T side where they would have a buffer of rounds going forward. However, with a quick 9-0 scoreline, ENCE put to rest any hopes for the South African team. In an interview with HLTV; Sonic mentions that ENCE was simply the better team on the server. However, they are still very proud of their achievement in reaching the Grand finals at the tournament.
If things had gone our way, the scoreline would’ve looked very different. We expected to play a solid T-half on Inferno. But, unfortunately, it didn’t happen. We hoped to bring it back on the CT side, but their game is really solid, so it was so hard.-
This was one of the first international LAN tournaments for the South African team as a whole. In the future, we expect the team to do even better as they get accustomed to the LAN settings. For now, ENCE takes home a cash prize of $50,000 and remain one of the strongest Tier two Counter-Strike teams.