The Major cycle chaos

We made it to the EU Closed Qualifiers and there’s a lot to go through. You ready?

After TSM’s embarrassing attempts at qualifying for the RMR, they immediately benched JACKZ. Quelle surprise. They didn’t even make it this far, for crying out loud. There’s a team called ex-ThunderFlash who made it further than them.

So did OG.

First off, the big teams who fulfilled expectations: NAVI smacked ECSTATIC and 9Pandas 13-6 a piece, Cloud9 moved past OG and 3DMAX, VP swiftly (well, as swiftly as they’re able to) moved into the 2-0 bracket — with BetBoom.

Yes, it will be nafany vs Cloud9 today for a Major spot. Watch it.

In Group B, Astralis and MOUZ stepped into a 2-0 game, with Eternal Fire (who’ve been impressive lately) and AMKAL, which is the Forester/Krad team, who played vs sYnck and KOI, which probably explains it.

Heroic, Spirit, and Preasy found themselves at 1-1 after yesterday — though Heroic’s loss to MOUZ and Preasy’s to Astralis was more understandable, Spirit started off losing to KOI and just scraped past Entropiq in OT.

BetBoom beat BIG badly (not really, it was 13-9, but allow us to spit some bars please) to put them in the 1-1 bracket, alongside OG who lost to Cloud9, 3DMAX who also lost to Cloud9 and fnatic who lost to… SAW. Not the best start, but at least they beat SINNERS!

Group A sees nothing exciting in the 0-2 bracket (JANO, SINNERS, Nexus and Permitta), but Group B has big names. Aurora have been solid in the last year, FORZE and Entropiq have been at big events and EYEBALLERS have… well, JW in 2024. But we still love him.

It’s going to be a bloodbath. It already is, really.

Today’s most exciting games:

No magixx without donk

Tier 1 CS is finally back! Okay yeah, it’s BLAST Groups but beggars can’t be choosers.

Just because it’s BLAST Groups doesn’t mean there aren’t a few banger games. BLAST nailed their placing on the calendar to be the first event featuring the all-new rosters of many teams, and we’re ready for their debuts. Spirit especially is an exciting prospect, sh1ro, and donk on one team? Sign us up.

Wait, what do you mean donk isn’t playing?

It turns out the LAN debut of this Spirit team needs to wait just a little longer. donk and magixx are both missing BLAST Groups due to visa issues, and it doesn’t look like there’ll be a solution. They’ll be subbed by their own coach hally and academy player baz.

But, that doesn’t mean Spirit’s opening game isn’t worth watching.

Their opponent is the all-new Liquid, who, yes have already played online, but who cares? It’s all about LANs, even if it’s just a group, LAN brings out the best, or worst, in teams. NA Major qualifiers don’t compare to playing face-to-face with the best of the best.

Especially with all the new teams at BLAST, every team has something to prove.

Like the new-look Falcons who are taking flight against Astralis on Monday. This is an interesting matchup, both teams have known good 3-man cores with 2 new stars added on top, BOROS and stavn headlining that change. We’re excited to see what both teams, especially Falcons with Snappi, are cooking.

It’s not just the new teams that need to prove themselves though.

G2 with nexa need to show their best if they want to avoid the questions about jks being removed. Even if the real questions are only asked come arena time, being consistent in groups is an important first step.

Speaking of group play, that’s been the bane of Complexity, who have run deep in all the tournaments they made it out of groups, but failed to make it out several times. Good luck at a tournament that’s all group play.

There are plenty of other good matchups, and we haven’t even gotten to all the teams with changes, but this is TLDR after all.

Just sit back and watch whatever game is on, odds are it’ll be good.

See the brackets.

The crystal balls

Roll up, roll up! It’s time for our own bold predictions - from the chaotic ‘best player in the world shouts’ to guessing which move will everyone be annoyed by, there’s something for everyone to laugh at.

HooXi talks his sh*t

Kassad made a bunch of fuss about the qualifiers the past week on behalf of his team BLEED, especially when they missed a slot due to registering too late.

After three other failed attempts to qualify, HooXi was quick to post a copy-pasta of a Kassad’s own burn that was fired in his direction. He sat on that one for a while.

Oh and it got better, thanks edeninho.

HLTV bold predictions that are actually bold

Top 20 season is fun for plenty of reasons, but we have a particular fondness for the bold predictions.

Sure, it’s a rolling ball game. Players are lazy, and will go to the last article to steal a pick. There’s even a stats-by-age leaderboard on HLTV nowadays, which is even better for your top-tier pro who has far better things to be doing than scouting talent.

But none of the picks were as boring as last year, when headtr1ck had been picked up by NIP and everyone and their nan decided to ignore the ‘bold’ part of the game.

This year, it’s been bolder than the most egregious font choices of your lecturers at college.

Swedish prodigy nilo took five predictions (guess what - he’s top of the 2023 under-20 rating leaderboard if you exclude donk and w0nderful) but even that is spicier than usual.

Following him was somewhat familiar names like BLEED’s lauNX-, B8’s r1nkle, Imperial’s noway, Preasy and ex-Astralis anchor Altekz, and OG newboy Nexius.

But after that, it was full chaos.

blameF picked xKacpersky, a random Polish kid he’s been playing FACEIT PUGs with. s1mple chose froz1k, a 15-year-old from NAVI Youth — but the crazy part is that Twistzz picked him last year.

sh1ro followed the script of new team Spirit by picking academy boy Magnojez. SunPayus picked KukuBambo, whose gamertag is up there with HeavyGod and MachineGun for unlikely ballers - a true winner in our books.

The only other player to earn a nod from two players was Finnish AWPer podi, an ENCE Academy product who posted a 1.18 rating in 2023.

Half, if not more, of these names will be resigned to history as failures, as strange quirks.

But, for the ones that break free from the jinx to become true greats – and the “I told you so” – must be as good a feeling as any trophy.

👀 Smack My Cheat Up

🤨 Unhealthy obsessions

🎨 Art is subjective

This TL;DR was written by aizyesque, NER0, Horizzon and napz.
Welshy coded the email and Incipiens copy edited.

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