We are extremely proud to announce that we are the ESL One Cologne 2016 world champions! The Brazilians came as defending champions from MLG Columbus 2016 and ended up as two times back-to-back ones!

SK Gaming had to overcome some of the biggest names in this CS:GO era including FaZe Clan, the French team G2 Esports, Flipside Tactics, Filip 'NEO' Kubski's Virtus.pro and in the end, the rising North American force of Team Liquid.

The opening map of the grand final against Team Liquid was our pick, Train. We began on the weaker offensive side, but managed to squeeze out the pistol round thanks to Epitácio 'TACO' de Melo Filho's three entry frags and one more later to end it. Liquid won the fourth and first weapon round, but Gabriel 'FalleN' Toledo and Fernando 'fer' Alvarenga were able to clutch back the next round and reset Team Liquid's economy. Marcelo 'coldzera' David came up with four excellent frags during a latter round to secure a close and important round for us. Despite Spencer 'Hiko' Martin and Alexander 's1mple' Kostylev's praiseworthy performance, the Brazilians managed to score one round lead for the second half.

Team Liquid were on the verge of winning the second pistol round and turn the tide in their favor, but their last hope was denied by the Brazilian Counter-Strike legend Lincoln 'fnx' Lau. Our division won all the remaining seven rounds to win the first map of the series 16-7.

Cobblestone was the second map of the grand final, on which both teams had incredible moments throughout the entire tournament. Unfortunately, we failed to prevent Team Liquid's aggressive rush towards bombsite A and dropped the first pistol round of the second map, but coldzera was able to take the third round against the odds. From there on the Brazilian duo FalleN and fnx added few more rounds in the scoreboard. Josh 'jdm64' Marzano scored an ace during the 14th round, but nonetheless we won the last round of the first half and finished 10-5 in favor.

Once again fnx clutched a crucial one-one-situation and secured the all important pistol round for the team. Team Liquid managed to take one more round before losing the next three and finish the event as runners-up.



Final standings:


We would like to thank our fans for their outstanding and continuous support during the entire event. We are extremely proud and happy to have such supporters.

This is only the beginning of the SK Gaming era. We're back! Stay tuned.