The Biggest Majors

Valve decided that a random Wednesday would be a good day to drop an update. And not your typical game update – a Major format update.

In 2025, gone are the pesky RMR’s and gone are those couple of teams who can’t make the Major through them. I’m looking at you Astralis. As of the Austin Major in 2025, the tournament expands to 32 total teams, from the paltry 24 we had before.

Now, you may be asking, “Oh Mr. TL;DR, how will these teams qualify for this major without the Regional Major Ranking system?”

From everything we’ve heard, teams will be qualifying for the first of three Swiss stages, which we’ll just call the “Cheddar” stage, based on Valve’s Regional Standings. This sounds quite familiar.

For your viewing experience, we’ll now start the Major with:

Majors, now with 50% more cheese!

Here’s the problem: if you add more matches, there’s a possibility of adding more and more best of ones. And do we really think that more BO1s are the best way to run our prestige event?

With no RMRs, you don’t get teams like Into The Breach with their Paris run or AVANGAR in the finals at Starladder Berlin. And with no RMRs, teams like Astralis actually may qualify just on pure luck. Milage may vary on that statement.

Perhaps the only (hopefully) good news we’ll get from this is that 32 teams get stickers, and sticker money. It’s been shown time and time again that sticker money can be life changing for teams and players that are on the up-and-up.

Hopefully, moving to 32 teams means we get more of these Cinderella stories, and not teams that probably shouldn’t make the Major to begin with.

Ninjas in Crisis

NIP are still bad, even with new players.

The new-look Ninjas have been eliminated first at Elisa Masters Espoo and by a team outside of the damn top 100. However, in the interest of fairness, NIP did use a stand-in.

But we think the full story is still hilarious, so let's rewind.

NIP came into this event with a new IGL, MisteM, and a lot to prove. So you’d hope they’d take an opportunity to do so in a BO1 against former teammate headtr1ck’s B8. Unfortunately for the Swedish core, their debut didn’t go as planned. They got taken all the way to overtime, where B8 dropped them right down to the elimination game.

There they faced the final boss. Some say he’s an old-school NIP player, a legend of the game, and the owner of one of the most recognizable ballsacks in the world. We just call him allu.

More specifically, NIP faced JANO. A Finish team that also houses Aerial and xseveN, names that will make the ears of some of our readers perk up.

They both did their part on map 1, but credit has to go to the lesser known HENU and juho who showed up for this game. Their performances along with an absolute dumpster fire of a performance from NIP were enough to win them the series 2:1.

It’s worth noting that JANO is the #171st-rated team in the world on HLTV. That’s almost 100 spots lower than Ohnepixel’s DRILLAS. AND THEY HAVE ALLU AS THEIR AWPER IN GODS YEAR 2024.

NIPs collapse is genuinely legendary. There is simply no legacy that has been tainted more than theirs. We just feel bad for the OG NIP players who have to sit through this mess. Who knows, maybe es3tag leaving them lifts some sort of curse. lol.

Our new favorite team…

This week Logan and Elliott discover their new favorite team and talk about roster moves that will make you say “that guy still plays counter-strike?”

Europeans on holiday

The most important—and in many ways the most fun—events of the year are fast approaching, and a bit of drama is already starting to unfold.

DRILLAS (you know, the one owned by that German streamer bloke) qualified to the Asia RMR with a team that had, you guessed it, two Asian players. You probably see where this is going.

Yesterday, DRILLAS announced the benching of AMSALEM via ‘mutual agreement’ because they ‘had different ideas of how to approach the game’, which seems fair enough. However, he was replaced by SENER1, who is from Kosovo. Which, for those keeping track, is not in Asia - and neither is Ukraine, where Kvem and Woro2k originate, and France, where hAdji originates. Geography is really tough.

This means a European team, with only one Asian (Israeli, which in some places, i.e. football, is considered European itself), has found itself in the Asia RMR, which seems a bit wrong.

Hilariously, TYLOO aren’t even in the Asia RMR, even though a European team is. Nothing weird is happening over here; just move along.

Stay tuned to see how it all goes once the RMR’s kick into gear, starting with Asia on November 11th.

💉🩸Stop the BLEEDing

✨ The wonderful things CS2 can do

🚪👈 It needs to vertiGO

This TL;DR was written by aizyesque, M3CHATR0NIC, Horizzon and napz.
Welshy coded the email and Crash_ copy edited.

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