Groups for ICSC 8 finals drawn

The groups for the Intel Challenge Super Cup 8 finals in Kiev this weekend have been drawn.

Season eight of the ICSC was influenced by a lot of team dropouts in the later part of the tournament, which made the league lose a bit of the glamour it had established by attracting the majority of the European elite.

The second group stage concluded last week and up next is the finals, which will take place July 9-10 (this weekend), at the Kiev CyberSport Arena. Despite qualifying in top spot of their group, TCM-Gaming will not make it to Kiev, which is the second season in a row for the Danish squad.

Craig "walkah" Walker, running management at TCM-Gaming, explained the reason to why the team won't travel to Kiev:

"Unfortunately we are the latest team to drop out of Season 8 of the Intel Challenge Super Cup. Although we made every effort to make ourselves available for the event, the two date options given by the organisers clashed with holidays of 2 different players. We will be looking towards preparing for GameGune, pending our invite of course."

This left two spots open for the finals, as fnatic last week had announced they too wouldn't make it. This made the organizers bring third placed teams in Group A and D, the two Russian teams Virtus.pro and Moscow Five.

The groups for the finals were drawn today and the groups are as follows:

Group A	Group B
SK Gaming	ESC Gaming
Frag eXecutors	Moscow Five
KerchNET	ROCCAT
tao	Virtus.pro

Just like the online stage of the season, teams will play each other twice in the group stage. Top placed teams in the two groups will advance directly to the semi-finals, while second placed team will play third placed teams from opposite groups. The eight teams will be fighting for a piece of the $10,000 prize purse, which will be split between top three finishers:

1. $5,000
2. $3,000
3. $2,000

The schedule for the ICSC 8 finals, which will span over two days, have been drawn out as below:

Saturday
10:00	SK Gaming	vs.	KerchNET
10:00	Frag eXecutors	vs.	tao
10:00	ESC Gaming	vs.	Moscow Five
10:00	ROCCAT	vs.	Virtus.pro
12:00	SK Gaming	vs.	tao
12:00	KerchNET	vs.	Frag eXecutors
12:00	Moscow Five	vs.	Virtus.pro
12:00	ESC Gaming	vs.	ROCCAT
14:00	SK Gaming	vs.	Frag eXecutors
14:00	KerchNET	vs.	tao
14:00	Moscow Five	vs.	ROCCAT
14:00	Virtus.pro	vs.	ESC Gaming
17:00	A3	vs.	B2
17:00	A2	vs.	B3
Sunday
10:00	A1	vs.	A3/B2
13:00	B1	vs.	A2/B3
17:00	Third place decider
17:00	Grand Final

You will be able to follow all of the action from the ICSC 8 finals right here on HLTV.org, starting from 10:00 on Saturday.

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