A triumphant return

Tournament wins don’t get much more complete than this.

Team Spirit dropped just one map en route to the BetBoom Dacha trophy, and that was to a MOUZ team that wasn’t in front of a big crowd. Beating not-in-front-of-a-crowd MOUZ is always impressive.

They absolutely demolished FURIA and 2-0’d Falcons quite simply too in order to reach MOUZ, and after Eternal Fire also managed to muscle past MOUZ, smacked the Turkish quintet 3-0 in the final.

Eternal Fire didn’t even get double figures on any map. All five of their players went negative, in both K/D and opening duels and sh1ro ended the series +26.

donk, somehow, went -5 in opening duels and still ended up 54-38 with the highest ADR. donk took the MVP for the event with a 1.48 rating (quelle surprise), with sh1ro not far behind him. donk and sh1ro went a combined +139.

No other player went above +35.

The duo’s stats are mental. There are very few stats the two don’t show up in the top five for. Most damage, most opening kills, highest rating, most kills per round. Spirit as a team went +154 over the tournament. The other finalists went -20.

Spirit’s Cologne nightmare seems to have ended.

Watch out, world. Spirit are back and donk is angry.

Final standings:

1st 🇷🇺 Spirit – $250.000
2nd 🇹🇷 Eternal Fire – $125.000
3rd 🇪🇺 MOUZ – $50.000
4th 🇧🇷 paiN – $25.000
5-6th 🇷🇺 Virtus.pro – $10.000
5-6th 🇧🇷 FURIA – $10.000

Spinx hates beans on toast

There was a rumour going around that before Team Vitality’s IEM Cologne win, Spinx had been looking for a way out, with the given reason basically boiling down to ‘he thinks mezii is rubbish’.

We’re paraphrasing, but like, barely.

All Vitality had to do was say it was complete nonsense, but the fact that XTQZZZ has come out and said there was some truth in it makes it pretty interesting.

He did, in an interview with HLTV, deny that they were ever in for huNter-, who was a rumoured replacement for Spinx, but wouldn’t say who they were trying to sign instead.

That means we’re free to speculate, and we think it was donk. Or XANTARES. Or ropz and that’s why he’s not been as good lately. No wait, it was s1mple, wasn’t it? Oh come on, tell us tell us tell us!

XTQZZZ admits that Spinx did actually ask to assess his options and was actively looking for a new team for a few days; but did also suggest that ‘players explore their options all the time’ and that it had nothing to do with mezii.

Of course he was going to say that, though. Just say it. He hates the English. It’s fine, they’re used to it. Trust us.

It’s not even mezii he dislikes, he just hates England. He’s trying to be more like the French. If he hates England enough, Vitality get the French flag back on HLTV.

XTQZZZ, however, loves mezii. But not Kyojin.

“People talk about him as if he were Kyojin, as if this guy were a huge noob.” That’s a truly brilliant quote. Defending your player by saying ‘at least he’s not rubbish like the guy we had before’ is amazing.

For some nicer quotes about mezii, take “There aren't many anchors better than him right now. I'm sorry.” and "Life is often about timing, and he came here to replace Magisk, who is irreplaceable and the best anchor in the world, so he's getting criticized for that. I'm sure that people wouldn't be on his case as much if he came here replacing dupreeh, for example.”

Does… does he hate dupreeh too?

What a rollercoaster. All we know is: Kyojin is a noob and Spinx wanted to leave before Cologne.

Around the world (Around the world)

PGL have channeled their inner Daft Punk and are taking CS around the world. (Around the world)

With Valve’s new rules for TOs coming into effect in 2025, PGL seems to be trying to capitalise the hardest. They’ve announced a whole new circuit of events in cities around the world. Starting off in Argentina in February 2025. Hopefully there’s some good audio guys in South-America.

So far, the cities PGL has announced for 2025 and 2026 are Buenos Aires, Bucharest, Astana, and Belgrade. With one Perfect World collab in 2025 in China, and events in Barcelona and Sao Paulo and Barcelona only in 2026.

Each one of these events will have a prize pool of 1.25 million USD and will be included in Valve’s new ranked tournament ecosystem. That also means that all invites will be done through Valve Regional Standings, with no open qualifiers of any kind. That doesn’t need to be a bad thing, but it’s definitely a little odd at face value when these events are billed by PGL as “fostering a more vibrant and diverse competitive scene.”

Qualification aside, this has big implications for the scene. With these events, PGL is putting up more prize money than ESL over the year, and it’s packed the schedule. That means there’s an incentive to attend PGL events over ESL events, and teams will have to choose invites carefully. That just means we’ll see more teams competing all around, which is awesome.

It’s only taken a whole new game and some Valve intervention, but CS finally has some competition in the TO space.

🪑 Have a seat (there is no bench emoji)

🔫 Pistols ≠ guaranteed loss

🗺️ de_all_about_maps.bsp

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

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