It never rains, but it pours.

That’s the theme of the Roobet Cup for many teams; not least MOUZ.

MOUZ have been… hmm, what’s a kind way of putting this… f*cking dreadful this year. Losing to teams you’ve never heard of, losing to teams their academy team are beating, losing in finals to stand-ins… a whole lot of losing.

Still, at least they wouldn’t lose to Eternal Fire in a best of three. They smashed the Turkish superteam 16-2 on Nuke, and then…

Lost the series. With their former AWPer dropping 32 on the decider.

It’s not like there are any easy fixes, either. They’ve had issues with their IGL and star players all year, but it’s not like their academy team is the best in the world and the IGL of that team was fragging out in the academy league or anything.

Ah, never mind.

Complexity are equally rubbish, but at least they lost to Cloud9 and Astralis; that’s understandable.

FURIA weren’t much better, as they and Outsiders both failed to get out of a group with forZe and 9z; with FURIA losing two best of threes to 9z. arT’s magic appears to be waning, and saffee hasn’t stopped this team being inconsistent.

You can bet your last dollar on them still beating someone decent next week, though.

OG and Entropiq went out in group A, which was mostly expected; and we’re used to OG disappointing permanently.

Oh ESIC. They can’t win now, can they?

In a similar decision to their one regarding Imperial’s coach peacemaker, Counter-Strike’s ever-popular governing body have lifted the suspension of 9z’s coach zakk due to receiving “additional information.”

God, if only they had announced their bans more than four days before the Major they could have had time to gather sufficient information to, you know, not falsely ban coaches attending the biggest event of their careers.

Hold on, though — zakk isn’t free quite yet. He could still face a ban, it’s just that ESIC have determined he is not enough of a threat to the competitive integrity of ESIC-partnered events for a suspension to be necessary.

Like peacemaker — who was banned for 22 days and 1 Major — and RobbaN — who was banned for 5.5 months — zakk’s crime appears to be one of not reporting that he had the bug, rather than actually using it to give info or gain a tangible advantage.

Confused? Us too. ESIC have a real public messaging problem; we’re finding out about their bans from journalists and by the time they announce anything the public have already made up their mind. Which generally amounts to expletives and claiming ESIC are biased against their favourite player, team, or region.

peacemaker, hally, and zakk’s bans were supposed to be slam dunks, the easy bans for clear wrongdoing. But just a short while later, two of those suspensions have been overturned and it seems unlikely the final ruling for all three will be as harsh as initially expected.

ESIC’s authority, whether it is fair or not, has evaporated.

FaZe are back.

Ish.

They toppled OG twice en route to the playoffs, but also managed to lose to BIG; but BIG have a weird way of doing that sometimes. They beat FaZe in the RMR at the peak of their powers, so it does happen.

Perhaps the biggest shock was that Astralis actually won some games, for once. Good for them.

Complexity and Movistar aren’t the hardest opponents, but that hasn’t stopped Astralis in the past. blameF actually had some teammates. They went through with Cloud9.

We mentioned a few of these teams earlier, but forZe, 9z, ENCE, and Eternal Fire make up the other teams in the playoffs. Now ENCE makes sense, but the others…

Eternal Fire struggled their way past Imperial and MOUZ in 2-1s after a loss against ENCE. They deserve to go through, but beating MOUZ isn’t exactly the feat it used to be.

They face BIG in the playoffs, though, so if they win that we’ll… have to say that beating BIG doesn’t really count, either.

9z, as we mentioned, beat FURIA 2-0 and then 2-1 to qualify, with their new AWPer nqz. They just keep signing players with three-letter names, for some reason.

The 17-year-old looked pretty tidy, but it was Chilean dav1d that ended the group stage as their highest-rated player. That’s just what NA needed - another country in South America with better players than them.

For forZe, it’s another impressive performance. This team - and especially Jerry throughout the years - keeps surprising and performing in big events. Well, big-ish.

They weren’t massively impressive on an individual level, but they were one of the most well-drilled teams around. Just as we’ve come to expect from Jerry teams.

They take on Astralis in the next round, which is spicy. We wouldn’t like to call that either way.

ENCE meet FaZe leaving Cloud9 to take on 9z. We’d ask what seeding they’re using, but they’ll probably reset it by accident in a minute.

🤦‍♂️ NA, please stop.

• At this point who isn’t matchfixing in NA?
• Look, you might think putting YEKINDAR on Liquid is going to fix things. We’re here to tell you it won’t.

😶 Hard to swallow truths…

• According to Dosia there’s only one issue with female CS: there’s not enough of it. We think it’s all just a ploy by the X God to… Put more fish in the sea.
• Apparently the CPH Flames roster was on bargain for a pretty low price, and still didn’t get sold. 160K*, what a price…*

🎭 RLewis Drama

• According to Richard Lewis, Stewie2K may be about to call it quits.
• Also according to Richard Lewis, the industry is garbage and he hates it. Cool.