The battle of regional kill record holder vs international kill record holder went the way of Marteen and Gentle Mates in the opening series of the first International of the year.
Map 1 went to Haven, where EDward Gaming leaned towards ZmjjKK onto the Chamber, since his Operator aim was shown to be one of the best in the world in recent years, he has now become the second entry for EDG, behind cb, who has taken up the dive duelist role.
Gentle Mates have seemingly perfected that idea of a clean-up duelist with Marteen on the Yoru rather than a Chamber. This wasn’t the redeeming factor in the first map, however, with ZmjjKK dropping 21 kills on the Chamber. He was matched on the opposite side by Minny on the Cypher.
The first map went 13-11 nearly to overtime if it wasn’t for Marteen stepping up in the final moments of the map.
The second map in this series went to Pearl where it was Marteen and GLYPH who stood out as the main performers on the side of Gentle Mates, where EDG didn’t have enough firepower to deal with the stars of the French organisation.
Gentle Mates rolled EDG in the final map of this series ending it 13-5, with EDG only allowed 1 round in their attack side, despite having a Double Duelist composition to try and gather rounds on their attack.
Despite Gentle Mates getting the win comfortably, a lot of eyes were on Marteen and ZmjjKK, to see who would come out on top in the KD leaderboard. Unfortunately for those fans, they ended the series tied on 32 kills each.
However, for Gentle Mates, that won’t matter too much since their clean 2-0 win makes a statement to other teams across Masters Santiago – They are here to win.
Valorant Digest 
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