The wait is over.

You can sink back from the edge of your seat, slide your feet upwards onto the coffee table and light a cigar. Assuming, of course, you’re in your own house.

The excitement is done, and TSM are back.

If you couldn’t tell, that just had more than a hint of something the kids call ‘sarcasm’.

This team has been rumoured for what feels like months, and from the moment it was rumoured to the moments after its announcement, there has been little more than shrugged shoulders and disappointed sighs.

It’s full of players you’ve heard of, but that’s almost the problem.

interz and JACKZ are both good role players, but you’d prefer to have just one role player. It’s fine, though! They have firepower in the back!

They’ve got the fading star power of valde, just five years since his last inclusion in a top 20, and CYPHER just five years away from his first, probably. That might be mean - if we see the CYPHER we saw in Paris some more, they might be alright. He was insatiable.

To round it out, you need a world class AWPer. That, however, is where TSM went for a young rookie - the Romanian MoDo, who by all accounts is a very decent player, but maybe not the superstar they’d need to push this team into the parts of the CS world they want to go.

After such a long build up, it’s quite a disappointing team for a big org, but maybe they can surprise us. After all, these have all been useful pieces on good teams in the past. Maybe they can all once again hit their peak, and bring this team up to…

Well, Movistar Riders-tier.

Imagine this: you're at the top of your dream job, with a wonderful family and a shitload of money. What do you do now you’ve achieved it all in life? Apparently, you start an Esports team.

Just ask Casemiro, De Gea, Beckham, Laporte, and most recently, Zinchenko. What's in Manchester’s water supply?

Zinchenko’s project comes in the form of a Ukrainian CS team named Passion UA and the Ukrainian footballer has some high ambitions.

In an interview with HLTV, he spoke about their goal of reaching “the top of the table”. We’re not sure if he knows that CS doesn’t work like the premier league, but we like his enthusiasm.

So who does he have on board?

Well, the players aren't exactly household names. In fact, none of them even have pictures on HLTV, but their first results have been promising. Under the name “Zen” they managed to beat both Sprout and Movistar Riders in BO1s at the IEM Sydney Open qualifiers.

That’s not even mentioning their coach, Kane. If you’ve been around for a while, your eyes just lit up.

For the uninitiated, Kane coached the Major winning Gambit lineup and spent most of his coaching career as Zeus’ right-hand man. He has quite the CV and is the type of experience this team, with its average age of 18, can really use.

Obviously, success isn’t guaranteed even with a major-winning coach, but an invested owner definitely helps.

With Zinchenko, Passion UA at least has that. The 26-year-old claims to be “open for them 24/7” and is eager to join them for a bootcamp. Those are just words, of course, so we’ll see how far Passion UA will make it. After all, footballer-owned Esports teams have yet to achieve much in CS.

If they do flop though, you know the memes will be good. Imagine the CS x Football Twitter crossover.

Passion UA are:

• 🇺🇦 Kyryl “marat2k” Samsoniuk
• 🇺🇦 Dmytro “jambo” Semera
• 🇺🇦 Vsevolod “s-chilla” Shchurov
• 🇺🇦 Nikita “jackasmo” Skyba
• 🇺🇦 Eduard “zeRRoFIX” Petrovskyi
• 🇺🇦 Mikhaylo “Kane” Blagin (Coach)

ESL Pro League is well under way, and that means that there has been a hell of a lot of Counter-Strike already.

It’s been nothing but 2-0s so far, which is good for us to summarise but makes it hard for us to pretend that any of these games were actually good. However, some story lines are beginning to develop.

So what do you need to know?

KSCERATO is back. After suffering from food poisoning last week, and having to deal with the death of his father over the summer break, Brazil’s best player had a slow start to the season. But he’s back in form here, with a 1.65 rating over four maps.

But that doesn’t mean FURIA are. FalleN and arT’s mish-mash of a system is still sputtering. They lost their opener 0-2 to Movistar Riders, and a 2-0 win over Grayhound does little to ease worries.

Vitality are here to win.The World #1 are not f*cking around. They smashed ORKS and NIP for fun, with Spinx dropping 31 kills in 19 rounds on hampus and company on Mirage.

Movistar Riders join them in the Upper Final, who beat FURIA and then GamerLegion to book a playoff berth. New signing adamS and JUST are performing in their roles well, and fragging IGL alex is as good as ever. The gaping wound left by SunPayus’ departure is starting to heal.

Astralis had a post-Cologne hangover with a loss to NIP, in what has to be considered an upset based on the start of the season. A loss on the Danes’ home map of Ancient is particularly concerning, and when you see how Vitality smashed NIP around you can see the gulf between the S tier teams and Astralis in the A tier.

Which leaves Astralis, NIP, GamerLegion, and FURIA in the middle bracket and Grayhound-ORKS in the last chance bracket, with two more playoff spots to play for.

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• Finally, “Headtr1ck’s AWP EDUCATION” will be featured on NIPflix.

🤨 Industry rule number #4080: esports people are shady…

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• TaZ thought about Polish CS, and then about CS in general. His conclusion? Shrink your ego kids.

🚗 It’s time to bring back the func

• Valve is really putting the Volvo back in their name with this totally real change.