Luminosity Gaming won the PUBG Americas Series Phase 1 (PAS1), taking home the first regional title of the 2023 season.
It was extolling the experience that the North American Jake “Snakers” Winant, from Luminosity, explained the team’s title, which was won in a dominant manner during the Grand Final, held from March 24th to 26th with 16 participating teams and a prize pool of $95,000.
“We have been a team for a long time, playing in a lot of competitions, facing all kinds of playstyles. This allows us to be dynamic in our play and be able to adapt to each lobby well”, explained Snakers.
This same roster played in the 2022 four regional tournaments and the 2022 PUBG Global Championship (PGC) representing eUnited. Always fighting for the top, the team won both editions of the ESL PUBG Masters, got 4th place at PCS6 Americas, reached runner-up at PCS7 Americas and reached 4th place at PGC 2022, the best representative of the Americas in the world championship.
It is for no other reason that Snakers praises Luminosity’s experience for winning PAS1.
“Outside of a few teams, the Americas region is mainly lacking in long time experience at the highest level. Luckily everyone on our team has that experience and we can leverage that into good results,” Snakers said.
Luminosity won the Grand Final with six Chicken Dinners and 166 points – 33 more than the 130 of runners-up and longtime rival Soniqs. In addition to getting lots of kills, the team reached the top 4 in nine out of 15 matches played – the highest number among all finalists.
“You need to be in the top 4 at some point to win the game, and winning every game you can is very important in order to win an event. Winning always for the most part provides the highest amount of points, so we always work to put ourselves in the best spots to do so. I am more happy with our win percentage than our top 4 percentage in PAS,” Snakers pointed out.
Although Luminosity maintained a record of two wins on each of the three days of the Grand Finals, Snakers said the team started slowly and then accelerated to get the trophy.
“We started the event out playing slower than we normally would, just to get a feel for the lobby and how the teams around us would play, after that we were able to exploit weaknesses in others’ play and capitalize on those for our own success”, Snakers said.
The team reached the third day and the decisive matches with a comfortable advantage in leading the leaderboard. Even so, Snakers said the players only relaxed when Soniqs fell in 16th place in the last game.
“Soniqs are a great team so they would have had the ability to close that gap at any time on the final day. We just relaxed and knew we had won when it was 100% confirmed in the last game when Soniqs crashed out in 16th place. However, our mentality has never changed, we play each individual game as just that game and we always play to win”, Snakers claimed.
As the PAS1 champions, Luminosity qualified for PUBG Global Series 1 (PGS1), as Soniqs, Shoot To Kill (STK) and Third Eye also did. Soniqs, as a PUBG Global Partner Team, already had a guaranteed spot in the international tournament, which will be held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, from April 27 to May 7, as recently announced.
“This win was important because it sets the tone for 2023. Our ultimate goal is to be a global partner team hopefully in the future, and we plan to win every event we enter to help prove we deserve it”, Snakers said, aiming at the international success that Luminosity has proven, for years, it is capable of maintaining.