NAVI star s1mple gives IEM Cologne medal to fan Helena Kristiansson\/ESL Gaming via ESPATNAVI prodigy Oleksandr \u2018s1mple\u2019 Kostyliev has given away his IEM Cologne runner-up medal \u2014 to a fan in the crowd. NAVI finished runners-up to FaZe in the \u2018Cathedral of Counter-Strike\u2019 after a five-map thriller that had a peak viewership of almost 1.25 million people, according to statistics website Esports Charts. s1mple received his second-place medal from George Woo, Esports Marketing Manager at Intel, after the game. He quickly removed it and glanced at it. Shortly afterward, he tossed it to a fan standing in front of the stage. In an interview with HLTV.org, s1mple denied that the gesture was born out of frustration. \u201cI\u2019m just traveling all the time with my bag, and I don\u2019t have a place for the big DHL MVP,\u201d he said. \u201c And this medal is\u2026 too many medals inside this bag, you know, I need to save them for home.\u201d With the loss in the grand final, s1mple\u2019s hopes of stopping FaZe from winning the Intel Grand Slam were dealt a significant blow. FaZe are now one tournament victory away from scooping the $1 million prize, and could become the fourth team to claim the prize \u2014 after Astralis, Team Liquid and NAVI \u2014 in early October, at ESL Pro League Season 16. NAVI\u2019s players will now enjoy what is set to be a short break before the new campaign begins on August 19 with the BLAST Premier Fall Groups. In the coming weeks, the Ukrainian organization is expected to make a decision on the future of stand-in Viktor \u2018sdy\u2019 Orudzhev, who has replaced Kirill \u2018Boombl4\u2019 Mikhailov in the starting lineup.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
NAVI star s1mple gives IEM Cologne medal to fan Helena Kristiansson\/ESL Gaming via ESPATNAVI prodigy Oleksandr \u2018s1mple\u2019 Kostyliev has given away his IEM Cologne runner-up medal \u2014 to a fan in the crowd. NAVI finished runners-up to FaZe in the \u2018Cathedral of Counter-Strike\u2019 after a five-map thriller that had a peak viewership of almost 1.25 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38688","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38688","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38688"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38688\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}