Recapping Day 4 at the MLG CS:GO Columbus major

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The first quarterfinal was the one with the clearest favorite. Na`Vi has been a top-three team in the world for the past 10 months, whereas NiP has not only struggled mightily in the past year, but had to attend this tournament without pyth, one of its starters, due to visa issues. With coach and in-game leader threat stepping in, there is no question the Ninjas we saw in action were not playing anywhere close to the team's full potential. Adding insult to injury, NiP does not have a dedicated sniper to match up against GuardiaN, the world's premier AWPer.

On the map front, Na`Vi is famous for never playing cache, but with an incredibly deep map pool otherwise, it had no issues with NiP's veto process. Inferno was considered the Swedes' best chance, but despite GeT_RiGhT firing up the crowd at Nationwide Arena with his SCAR-20 ace, the ex-CIS powerhouse simply overpowered NiP, getting an easy 16-9 win. Mirage lasted one round longer, but dominant terrorist side guaranteed Na`Vi that second half would be a walk in the park. GuardiaN's team, which dominated NiP in the semifinals of the previous major, will go on to face astralis.

The second game of the day was the most anticipated one. Despite olofm's wrist issues, fnatic was considered a clear favorite to win it all, even after falling short against Liquid in the group stage and facing one of the all-time toughest brackets. However, that bracket is now the problem of device's team, which were absolutely dominant in knocking out this iteration of fnatic for the first time since dennis joined the team in early November. A six-tournament winning streak is no more, as fnatic failed to make the semifinals for the second major in a row, following another group-stage upset loss.

On overpass, karrigan's team racked up an 8-0 lead before the Black and Orange could get on the board. The self-proclaimed best player in the world and fnatic's in-game leader, flusha, could not lead his team to the promised land; dupreeh's fragging led the way for astralis to clinch a comfortable 16-10 win, with the Swedes prolonging the map for three extra rounds after facing map point at 7-15. Community members criticized fnatic for a cocky veto-phase strategy, picking the harder side of overpass first, and then relying on cache -- the map astralis had beaten fnatic mere weeks ago offline -- as its pick.

That wound up being a catastrophic decision. On cache, astralis put forth one of the largest first-half deficits fnatic has ever faced, winning 13 terrorist rounds and never letting the Swedes get into the game. astralis won a couple of key rounds to break the money of JW and company, but generally it outplayed its opponents so much that the economy did not play a huge part. The performance of astralis on cache was a masterpiece, simply put. Leading the way in the best-of-three -- astralis's first such win over fnatic in 182 days -- was dupreeh with a godly 1.57 rating, +25 K-D, 107.5 ADR and 1.11 KPR. As said before, it will take on Na`Vi this Saturday in the semifinal.

The final match of the day was the one that heated up Nationwide Arena the most: the battle between the two North American playoff teams, CLG and Liquid. Led by strong performances -- again, as in the decider against Gambit -- from tarik and jdm64, the team coached by pita racked up a comfortable 12-3 half-time lead as terrorists on cache -- only for the tables to turn, entirely, when switching teams. Notably, in the only three rounds Liquid could muster on the defense, s1mple had two triple-kill rounds, and a quad kill -- that's how toothless his team was overall.

In the second half, Liquid outdid its dominant 12-3 terrorist half against FaZe. For some reason, CLG refused to take a timeout until the game was tied at 12-12, and while its dual AWP setup got it on the board shortly after, Hiko's team was able to clinch a key 16-13 comeback win on its own map pick -- despite tarik's monstrous 1.56 rating, +15 K-D and 1.17 KPR performance. It is a team game, and the team coached by Jame^s simply played better, despite continuing its struggles as counter-terrorists so far at MLG Columbus.

On the second map, the difference between the teams only became clearer. Liquid lost the opening pistol round, but was able to win Round 2, and s1mple's aggressive sniping led it to nine rounds at half. In the second half, CLG looked spent -- refusing to even take a timeout on the verge of elimination -- and was outscored 0-7. Notably, s1mple had an 8-1 opening duel differential, combined with a 1.57 rating -- barely outdoing tarik's in Map 1 -- 115 ADR and a 1.18 KPR. Following the 3-12 opening half on cache, Liquid finished the match on a 29-7 run, showcasing brilliant Counter-Strike.

Saturday morning, the last quarterfinal between Brazilian Luminosity and Polish Virtus.pro will kick off the day and finalize the semifinal pairs. Next up is Na`Vi's game against astralis, while Liquid will take the stage last, again, for a date with the day's first game's winner. Virtus.pro is the only remaining previous major champion in contention going into Day 5, so it is possible we may see a fresh winner for the first time since DreamHack Winter 2014.

For more CS:GO commentary, follow Tomi on Twitter: @lurppis_