Siege Around the World this Week - June 18-24th

This series aims to highlight the best and most interesting games of all the lower leagues in competitive Siege, from the BR6 national league to the German Saturday League, to ensure that you don’t miss the best action going on at all levels of play.

French League 2019 - Regular Season

The French league kicks off this week as eight teams prepare to face off in a weekly, double round-robin, best-of-one map games before a LAN Final at the Paris Games Week on the 1st to 2nd of November.

The tournament will star the three Pro League teams of Team Vitality, LeStream Esport (who qualifies as they have three players from Francophone countries), and PENTA, who are invited thanks to the French player of Benjamin "Krunch" Ploton subbing into the roster to create a French core lineup. Krunch is best known for his performance at last year’s French national events, the Coupe de France and the 6Cup, while under the organisation of Mock-it Academy as they took both of the Coupe de France 2018 finalists to within a single round of defeat during that event.

As well as these, we have the Challenger League side of Supremacy, ZephiR and RaFaLe’s new lineup of Team MCES, and the ex-Pro League organisation of Team Oplon who will be attending with a completely new roster since we last saw them. Finally, we have Bastille Legacy and GameWard Team who, despite a number of notable players between the teams, will likely be the underdogs throughout the league.

The league's action will consist of four best-of-one games every Wednesday from 7:30 PM CEST onwards, with this week’s highlight being between LeStream Esport and PENTA as we’d get our first look at Krunch on the roster. Also of note tomorrow is the last match of the day as the GameWard Team player of Aherys plays against his old roster of Supremacy for the first time.

Russian Major League Season 2 - Finals

The LAN Finals of the Russian national league take place this weekend as four teams travel to Moscow to fight for the top share of the ₽500,000 (€7,000) prize pool and for the title of the Russian summer season champions.

The four teams that will be attending this event are the reigning Pro League champions of Team Empire, forZe -- led by Empire’s old player of Artyom "Shockwave" Simakov -- and both projectV and Nameless, who qualified for the Finals after entering the league via the open qualifiers. The clear absence from this lineup of teams is AVANGAR, a team which almost beat Empire on two occasions last season while known as Raiders, and were a single map away from defeating LeStream and qualifying for the Vegas Minor just last month, yet ended the season in fifth position within the league with a 1-4-2 win-draw-loss record.

Team Empire will, therefore, be the clear favourites for the event as only G2 Esports have been able to stop them in a meaningful match, but this does present an opportunity for the three teams present to get some world-class experience against the best players in Russia. Particularly of note is forZe, who currently sit at the top of the open qualifiers for the Raleigh Major and finished in the top four of the Six Invitational closed qualifiers which, along with the addition of one of the most experienced players in the sub-region, Shockwave, makes them very strong contenders for at least the Challenger League going forward.

The event cast by Maxim “STARBOY” Fomin, Artem “Vespertuss” Orlov, Egor “Braun” Braun and Georgiy “FasterTL” Gagiev will take place at the Cyberspace eSports arena in Moscow, with tickets still available to buy from here. Attending the event will offer the two days worth of action as well as league merchandise to buy, quizzes at the event, a Brawlhalla mini-tournament, the Eagle Flight VR game available to play and “exciting quests” to take part in. Alternatively, all the action will be streamed on the rainbow6ru Twitch account starting from around 10:30 AM CEST with the grand-final scheduled for around 3 PM CEST on Sunday.

“Player statistics after the completion of the Russian Major League’s regular season”

Brasileirão 2019 - Immortals vs INTZ eSports Club

This game will be interesting for two main reasons; it may decide who will be going to LAN and it will be a repeat of Friday’s Pro League matchup.

Currently, NiP and Black Dragons have a single game left this season and sit on 17 points, while INTZ and Immortals have two games left and sit on 14 and 11 points, respectively. This means at the moment, all four of these teams could still qualify for LAN, but if IMT fails to win this game, their season is over while a victory for INTZ puts them in the running proper, with them then just needing to beat ReD DevilS to qualify.

What is particularly interesting is that should Immortals win this game and round 14’s games all go to the higher seeded team, we will have a four-way tie for third, with just two of the teams progressing onwards. This is similar to last season’s standings where a three-way tie for fourth led to YeaH! Gaming getting the LAN spot over Team Liquid and BRK e-Sports. However, with four teams involved over a six-month-long league, this would truly be a remarkable finish to one of the best leagues in R6.

As already mentioned, this will also be a rematch of Friday’s matchup between the same two teams in the Pro League. This means that over the three day period we’ll have three maps to judge these teams and the new INTZ player of Vinicius "Vnx" Mello in particular. He will likely be eager to get as much experience as possible on this new lineup and facing the same teams multiple times allows us, the viewers, to better judge consistency within the team.

We also have a second matchup this weekend in the BR6 league, as always, between ReD DevilS and Team Liquid. While it has certainly been shown in this league that upsets do happen, this is literally the first placed verses last placed teams in the league and so it seems very unlikely that RDS will get their very first win of the season in this matchup. This will, however, very likely push FaZe out of the grasp of Team Liquid and officially clinch first place of the regular season for the reigning Brazilian champions.

ESL Premiership Summer 2019 - Natus Vincere vs T3H Esports

Finally, we have the British national league as the Pro League roster of Na’Vi faces the third-placed team of T3H Esports, a roster which came into the league via the open qualifiers and has certainly surprised many. T3H, best known for their ex-Team Secret player of Ryan "Lacky" Stapley, have already beaten their three fellow new entries into the league of Demise, Exillium Esports, and Horus Esports as well as drawn against the fourth-seeded roster of Who knows, and will now hope to keep their unbeaten record alive against Na’Vi tomorrow.

As expected, Na’Vi themselves have been on quite a rampage through the league so far, as they dropped just eight rounds in four games, meaning that T3H and the reinvigorated Team Secret roster are the only hope of stopping Na’Vi getting the first clean sweep of victories in the history of the ESL Premiership R6 events.

We will also see a matchup between Team Secret and Wind and Rain tomorrow -- a roster which just picked up the ex-Team Secret substitute of Jack “Plebma” Bentley. While there seems to be no ill-will between any of the players involved, this will still be an interesting match both for this meeting and as a rematch of last season’s semi-final game, making this matchup between seeds two and three in the league.

Other Tournaments

As well as these tournaments, this week will see the kick off of the Six Masters League, the national league for the ANZ region, the Benelux League LAN Finals, and the first open qualifier of Stage 2 of the US Nationals 2019, which will include teams such as Rogue, ‘92 Dream Team, DarkZero Esports, and Spacestation Gaming. Full details of these events can be found in the articles linked above with full coverage available later this week.

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These are the biggest and most interesting matchups this coming week across the secondary-level tournaments around the world. Keep an eye out for more SiegeGG coverage of all levels of Rainbow Six, including the Benelux League LAN Finals in the Netherlands this weekend.