State-enforced integrity

“Sadly for you, John Tier 2, your social credit score is too low for a CCT event.”

That’s the exact line that many players were told when they tried to sign for a new tier two team this past year. And by exact line, we mean we’re HEAVILY paraphrasing.

Essentially, CCT works with a company called GRID – a betting data provider – which has a rather ironically named ‘integrity team’ akin to North Korea calling themselves the ‘Democratic Republic.’ Sadly, for players like mwlky, this has led to teams refraining from signing certain players altogether.

Here’s how it works: Your team gets marked as one that has ‘abnormal betting patterns’ (which, again, is vague and open to manipulation), and slowly but surely, you get blacklisted from CCT events.

This is a problem because a tier 2 or 3 team needs those events to even survive, and so if you’re blacklisted, you’re not finding a team. Who knows how many talented players have fallen to the wayside because of this?

That’s just the tip of the iceberg that HLTV uncovered this week, and we do recommend reading the whole thing if you want to get angry this morning.

Valve implemented a less egregious rule this week. They decided that multi-continental teams no longer get to choose which qualifier they play for the Major. In short, Liquid will have to play in the Americas, and Wildcard will have to play in Europe. You can think DRILLAS for that. 

Finally, a positive ohnePixel impact.

Heads have been hunted

If the round of 32 disappointed you with the lack of upsets, the round of 16 certainly won’t have.

BLAST Bounty has so far served as an excellent breath of fresh air for the Counter-Strike scene, and we’ve also got to see which teams may take a little while longer to get up to speed with their new signings.

The second round kicked off with a big upset win, as HEROIC took down Liquid. We’ll talk about this more later, but out of three HEROIC cores, this win means that the current one is the only one to actually make it to the LAN.

Is that karma? Possibly.

The heads kept rolling, FaZe were knocked out in the very next game. With no lower bracket for them to claw their way through, this didn’t shock us, but a loss to paiN isn’t exactly the statement of intent they would’ve liked to make in their debut event.

The following games were a bit more straightforward.

Spirit spanked FlyQuest and NAVI also comfortably saw off Astralis. Could they not have added to the fun of the format? Spoil sports.

Day two began with Eternal Fire seeing off Falcons, a rather meek exit for the first event as a unit. We don’t care that much, a dire NiKo performance will always get a smile out of us. And it’s made even better when that performance is because XANTARES shows him how a real player aims.

Next up we saw FURIA vs. BetBoom. BetBoom won. That’s all we have to say about that.

Vitality took down Virtus.pro, which was to be expected, but we didn’t expect G2 to have to come back from a map down against BIG.

However, we did expect BIG to crumble for the remainder of the game. Because, and this will surprise absolutely no one, they’re not actually that good.

We guess that’s another thing to smile about.

In our LANe, flourishing

This online nonsense is over, proper LAN CS is back. … Next Thursday.

With the online phase of BLAST bounty being over, we’re finally getting what we’ve been waiting for. We get to see some of these teams in a LAN setting during the finals in Copenhagen. Not all the teams we’d want to see are here, but that’s entirely on them… They know who they are.

In their defense, not even everyone qualified will be there.

BetBoom are going to be missing two players: Boombl4 and zorte have visa issues, so the team will have to field their registered subs. KaiR0N- and…. nafany? We thought he was dead.

At this point, we’d normally preview some games to watch out for, but there aren’t any matchups announced. The games will be drawn live on Wednesday the 22nd, a day before the games start. It’s a novel idea, but it makes writing a preview in a twice-weekly newsletter much harder. Won’t someone think of us JOMO-enjoyers? (edit: joy of missing out)

Well, at least we’re guaranteed to get some bangers. Vitality, Spirit, G2, and Eternal Fire are all still in the event. At least some of them are bound to play a good game. We’re just sure NAVI won’t

Surely you can’t jinx every game at an event. Right?

See you Friday morning for an update and a preview of the weekend’s games.

Captain Sweden: Civil War

The Swedish scene is in a bit of a mess right now, and draken has decided to voice his frustrations over NIP’s recent roster changes and management decisions.

“It’s truly crazy how you have been under ‘construction’ for the past 7 years without any progress. Still stomping your head against the wall to get this mediocre international lineup to work”, draken states, following NIP's disappointing defeat to CYBERSHOKE in the CCT Season 2 Europe Series 16 Play-In.

NIP has been cycling through Swedish players and making questionable managerial decisions for the past seven years - that much we can agree on.

But now, just as they’ve found a glimmer of hope with a lineup that actually makes sense, draken decides to speak up – right after the team’s first BO3 loss together, having only played three official BO3s as a squad, and not even with the full roster due to Valve’s rules. That doesn’t seem fair to us.

“You had the chance to pick up my Johnny Speeds lineup and you could have even kept REZ. We barely practiced and had a coach 50% of the time and look where that got us”, draken adds.

We’re pretty sure claiming you didn’t practice much while trying to make a case for your team is a bit counterintuitive. But hey, maybe NIP will buy into it - they do have a history of making questionable decisions.

Honestly, this rant just comes off as draken being upset that NIP didn’t give him or the Johnny Speeds lineup a shot and is now crying on Twitter to see if it’ll stick. LinkedIn is probably a better option if you’re looking for some work, buddy.

“This international concept has made you crazy. & THREAT speaks publicly that there are so few Swedish talents. I beg to differ and I will show you”.

Well, draken, the floor is yours. We’ll be watching.

🧠 It’s all in your head…

☹️ Valve sucks, Steam sucks, CS2 sucks, and you suck.

🕶️ The latest on Nouns(.fe)

This TL;DR was written by aizyesque, shoko, AN1MO, Horizzon and napz.
Crash_ coded the email and copy edited.

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