PMPL 2020 South Asia Day 1 Recap: Biggest Surprises And Upsets

Not even the Coronavirus pandemic could keep the biggest regional PUBG Mobile tournament in this season from happening. Day one of PMPL was action-packed, with 5 matches played on all four maps. 2 of those matches were from Sanhok, the smallest map in the game – and that’s why the first day is filled with upsets. Due to the new formats of the tournaments, the participants were divided into five groups: the first four matches were from the teams of group A+B+C+D, while the last match has group E teams replacing B.

Untitled — The overall standings of PMPL - Indian teams got all the top spots

Firstly, we would list out the team that exceeded our expectations:

1 - TSM Entity

Entity Gaming is more or less the favorites in this tournament, with consistent performance throughout the previous tournaments. They scored very impressively in the first match of the league, with an impressive 19 kills chicken dinner. Entity ended day one at the top of the table, with 97 points after five games.

They are also the team that scored the most kill as well – 42 kills in 5 games, which is over 8 kills per match. Entity Gaming is definitely going to win the whole thing if they managed to keep this level of performance up.

2 - Fnatic

Fnatic, with an array of very talented individual players, has been doing rather well in the matches. While they had a rather slow start in the first two matches, with only 9 points gained, Fnatic managed to reverse the situation in the third round, grabbing the second-place finish. And in the fourth match on Vikendi, it gets even better with them grabbing the chicken dinner

Fnatic ended the first day at the second spot on the leaderboard, with 27 kills and 68 points. While they are not nearly as dominant as Entity, there is still much that they have not revealed.

Secondly, let's talk about the teams that have been performing surprisingly poor on the first day:

3 - Orange Rock

Orange Rock Esports need to step up their game immediately

Orange Rock was expected to be amongst the top teams in this tournament – with them having one of the most balanced squads in PUBG Mobile India. However, looks like there is something wrong in their team coordination, as they did very badly on Day 1. In the first 5 games, Orange Rock did pretty badly, with only 20 points and 9 kills to their name.

However, they can still bounce back, as there is still a lot of time for them to resolve their issues.

4 - Marcos Gaming

Marcos Gaming did pretty well in the previous preliminaries – they are ranked pretty high on the “most aggressive squad in PUBG Mobile India” list. However, they didn’t perform well on the first day of the PMPL, with only 25 points and 13 kills to their name. While 13 kills is not something to scoff at – it is pretty much the opposite of how the team has been performing.

They really need to step it up really soon and change their strategy to get more placement points.