f0rest leaves

Pour one out for the trees, f0rest has retired.

f0rest’s career spanned 20 years, 3 CS games, and 513 editions of TLDR. And after all that, he’s walked away with a cool 50+ event wins across CS games, and four HLTV top 20s to show for it. His career is nothing short of legendary.

And it’s even more insane if you put it into context.

f0rest was playing professional CS a full year before m0nesy was even born, and had won over 20 events by the time m0nesy started going to school. With that in mind, his longevity is incredible. In 2016, 13 years after he started playing, he won the MVP award at IEM Oakland. Oh, and he was 7th best player in the world that year! (According to HLTV)

We’re pretty sure that f0rest could still play on NIP if he wanted to, and he’d probably be their best player somehow. Maybe that’s not the highest bar…

It’s a testament to an amazing player that we’ve left out NIP’s 87-0 unbeaten run until this point, but honestly, that’s because it undersells the individual. That era has its caveats, and f0rest was much bigger than just that NIP team. In many ways, he rivals GeT_RiGhT not only as the face of the NIP organisation, but that era of CS.

Him, GeT_RiGhT, or Allu’s Red Bull.

But before we make it sound like he died (he’s alive, we think), we’ll leave you with his tweet and the love it got. Not a single hate comment in sight. Didn’t think that was possible.

Americas Royal M Rumble

Alongside the Asia RMR, which we’ve already previewed, the Americas qualifier is also kicking off in a couple of days - and, in our humble opinion, it’s far more exciting to watch. That is, unless you’re waking up at 4AM to catch it.

This RMR features 16 teams, with only 7 Major spots up for grabs.

Liquid and FURIA are our safe bets. Both are solid teams that have proven they can compete at the highest level, so they should have little trouble making it, even if they drop a map or two. That said, knowing how hit or miss they can be, there’s always the chance we might be terribly wrong.

Now, this is where things get interesting. With five spots left, there’s a group of teams that will likely be duking it out for the sticker money: Complexity, paiN, MIBR, 9z, M80, and Imperial.

These teams are all at a similar level, at least based on what we’ve seen from them recently. If we had to guess, paiN and Complexity are probably the closest to challenging Liquid and FURIA in terms of likelihood to advance, but it’s going to get messy - and that’s exactly what we’re here for.

As for the rest - BOSS, Legacy, Nouns, Wildcard, KRÜ, RED Canids, BESTIA, and Case - they’ll likely steal a map from the bigger teams, but that's probably as far as it'll go. Hey, at least you got a paid trip to China - could be worse, right?

Of course, it wouldn’t be an Americas RMR without its share of upsets, so forget everything we just said - chances are, it’ll end up being the complete opposite.

Time to lock in with a Major preview

Woah, that’s a new look.

The boys have been busy this week with not just one, but two podcasts for your aural pleasure.

We’ve got your bog standard, run-of-the-mill chaos that we bring every week. And then you get a new, different type of chaos in the second.

We talked about the first one earlier this week, but this longer-than-usual video is a prospective look at the Major with a… retrospective lens. That is, what has changed in the last six months for all of these important teams, and where are they now?

We think this is perfect for people who haven’t been that locked in since Copenhagen, be that because you’ve been busy with work, you’ve got a new girlfriend who thinks games are bad and cringe, or you simply have fallen out of love with pro CS for a few months.

Trust us, it happens – but this is your ticket back in. Don’t put old trusty out to pasture just yet.

We’ve got you covered in a short and sweet 1.5hr conversation.

And let it be known, we were talking about Alter Ego and how cool they are before the HLTV article. Bloody bandwagoners.

There’s plenty of value even if you’ve watched every single game since then, because we’re cool and funny and have our own opinions that you can mock retroactively when we’re wrong. It’s perfect ‘second monitor’ content - we won’t be offended.

Listen now. We are no longer asking. And share it with that friend, so you can watch the Major together on the same terms.

ℹ️ All about the DRILLAS

🤓☝️ Statistically speaking…

🧑‍💻 Devs being cool

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

How did you like this edition?
Help us improve by clicking a smiley below.

Give your friend the tl;dr