Rainbow 6 Siege - Winter 2020 - Week 1

NSE’s Rainbow 6 Siege tournament has finally returned as over 70 new and familiar teams enter the fray to be declared the next NSE Siege Champions! With the promotion of NSE’s back-to-back Spring and Summer Champions to UKIN Division 2, will Staffordshire University’s new roster manage to retain their Championship title? Or will a new contender be crowned Champion?

The beginning of a new academic year is always a volatile time as we see fresh faces replace those who graduated the year before and new teams emerge from the ashes of old. With only two more weeks and 4 best of one games remaining until our Championship Division teams are declared, we expect to see a lot of upsets this season as some of the most prominent Universities from last year’s competition are surpassed by fresh faces.

We’ll be bringing you some of the most anticipated games of the qualification stages on our livestream. If you missed last Thursday’s broadcast then don’t worry, we’ve got all the highlights here:

Our very first game of the season saw us join the University of Lancaster. A familiar team from previous seasons, Lancaster’s roster is mostly unchanged from the team which came runners up to Coventry and Staffordshire in the Winter 2019 and Spring 2020 seasons respectively. As anticipated, Lancaster started their season incredibly well, taking a swift 7-0 victory over University College London of Kafe Dostoyevsky, notoriously one of Lancaster’s favourite maps.

Speaking to Lancaster’s Captain, Mahi, after their first game, the team of mostly third-year students are looking to enjoy this season while they focus on their final year of University. Despite shifting their priorities away from winning the NSE Championship, we expect this veteran team to be a formidable opponent in the competition and are still likely to be one of the favourites to win.

Following Lancaster’s 25-minute victory over UCL, we joined Swansea, another prominent University from last year’s Championship Division, as they took to Coastline against DeMontfort University. Swansea had a shaky start to their game, trading the opening four rounds of their defensive half back and forth before finally securing two consecutive rounds to lead their half 4-2.

Swansea looked far more comfortable on the attack as they picked up their two opening attacking rounds to take us from a rocky start to an early match point. With DeMontfort needing to claw back four consecutive rounds against match point, Swansea’s victory seemed inevitable. Despite mounting a strong defence of the Kitchen and Service bombsites, DeMontfort’s comeback was short lived as Swansea closed out the game with a nice 1v2 clutch by SugarHoney.LK in the 10th round:

Swansea’s comfortable 7-3 victory over DeMontfort sends them well on their way towards Championship qualification as they enter this week as one of the 8 undefeated teams so far this tournament. Be sure to tune into our livestream this Thursday at 7PM GMT as we join two more teams on their journey towards Championship qualification.