JiJieHao Claim a 13-10 Upset Over Spirit at the EWC

Spirit will face Luminosity in an elimination best-of-three, while JiJieHao will play GamerLegion for a place in the round of 16.

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JiJieHao Completes the EWC Main Event Field With a 2-1 Win Over HOTU

JiJieHao claimed a 13-10 upset over Spirit in a Group A best-of-one at the Esports World Cup 2026 in Paris on August 12. Spirit struggled throughout the match, turning one of the tournament favorites into an early casualty while JiJieHao kept finding ways to punish every mistake.

Spirit entered the match with a substantial statistical edge. The August 3 ranking figures put Spirit at 2,011 points and JiJieHao at 1,159, an 852-point gap. A pre-match model gave Spirit a 90.1% chance to win the map, making the 13-10 result an especially sharp reversal.

Recent form also leaned heavily toward Spirit. The team had gone 14-2 over the previous 90 days, including an 11-2 record against top-20 opposition. JiJieHao stood at 9-5 against tier-one competition over the same period and had only one prior win against a top-20 team, although four of its 14 recent matches had still ended as upsets in its favor.

Spirit gave away a 4v2 and repeatedly suffered from missed shots and poor decisions. Danil “donk” Kryshkovets was the only player who offered sustained resistance, while Dmitry “sh1ro” Sokolov endured a rough outing with a 0.52 rating.

JiJieHao’s answer came from both sides of the scoreboard. Dionis “sinnopsyy” Budeci delivered a key triple during the second pistol round and finished with 95.4 ADR. Lebanese AWPer Hussein “m1N1” Hijazi also made the difference, finding three kills in a crucial 2v4 and repeatedly reading Spirit’s rotations correctly.

The result came shortly after JiJieHao secured its place in the main event with a 2-1 win over HOTU on August 9. JiJieHao had played six matches in the previous 30 days and reached the EWC through the open qualifier without a loss. Spirit, meanwhile, had reached the BLAST Bounty final in Malta before arriving in Paris, but its performance here fell well below that level.

Since November, underdogs had won 31.6% of 2,639 matches where the teams were separated by at least 40 ranking places. A best-of-three gives the stronger team another map to recover from a bad start, while a best-of-one turns one misstep into a full series loss.

After the win, sinnopsyy summed up JiJieHao’s mood in a post-game interview with HLTV.org: “We are feeling so confident. We just beat the world number one so I don’t know what to say anymore.”

Spirit will play Luminosity in an elimination best-of-three on August 13. JiJieHao will meet GamerLegion on the same day, with a spot in the round of 16 on the line.

JiJieHao’s advancement odds moved above 50%

A Glicko rating model used to estimate which teams would advance changed sharply after the early matches. These are model estimates rather than official tournament probabilities, but JiJieHao’s estimate climbed from 21.3% to 53.2%, a 31.9-point increase.

The win also changed the team’s immediate path through the event: JiJieHao now needs one win in a best-of-three to advance instead of two.

More match highlights

0SAMAS holds off Spirit in a 1v2:

sinnopsyy finds three kills in the pistol round:

sh1ro’s difficult round continues with a missed spray:

donk keeps Spirit alive with a Desert Eagle play:

sh1ro falls to his own Molotov:

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