Aurora come back from a map down to beat Astralis and reach EPL final

Angel Kicevski March 14, 2026

49 1 minute read

Aurora moved into the grand final of ESL Pro League Season 23 after a 2-1 semifinal win over Astralis, overturning an opening-map defeat to take the next two maps and the series. The series began on Astralis’ pick, Nuke, where Aurora answered an early dualies quad kill from Ali “Wicadia” Haydar Yalçın but still fell short in a tight finish, losing the map 11-13. Astralis seized a late round with upgraded pistols that swung the economy and closed out their choice.

Aurora responded emphatically on Dust2. Led by captain Engin “MAJ3R” Küpeli, the Turkish side ran a dominant Terrorist half, reached a 10-2 lead on their offense and converted the map 13-2 after winning their fourth pistol round of the match. Inferno provided the decider. Aurora took the first pistol but dropped the subsequent force buy, then recovered and built a 7-5 lead before switching to defense. Astralis regained momentum on the T side and opened a 10-7 advantage, but Aurora’s rifling and larger team plays, including key contributions from Wicadia and Özgür “woxic” Eker, pushed them back into the lead and they closed the map 13-10.

The victory clinched Aurora’s first semi-final appearance of 2026 into a grand final scheduled for 15 March 2026, where they will face Natus Vincere in a best-of-five. Astralis will drop to the third-place decider against FUT later the same day. Aurora had not reached a semifinal in 2026 before this event, and Astralis’ path to the playoffs included an earlier win to lock their place in the Stage.

The match produced several highlight clips from the series:

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Counter-Strike 2 is a free-to-play multiplayer tactical first-person shooter developed and published by Valve. Released in September 2023, it is the fifth main entry in the Counter-Strike series and serves as a direct replacement for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive on Steam. Two teams, Terrorists and Counter-Terrorists, compete in objective-based rounds across modes such as bomb defusal and hostage rescue. Built on the Source 2 engine, the game introduced volumetric smoke physics, revised weapon handling, and a new sub-tick server architecture. It inherited all cosmetic items from its predecessor and features both a map-specific Competitive mode and a numerically ranked Premier mode.