Good things come in threes

We all doubted them when they benched siuhy, but MOUZ continue to make everyone look really, really dumb.

Through to their third consecutive grand final, after taking down Eternal Fire, it’s looking like those stage jitters have now all gone away.

torzsi dominated the series. The Hungarian is really staking a claim as one of the best AWPers in the world. We’ve always liked him, but it is crazy when you think about how bad dexter made him look.

[insert obligatory dexter joke here]

As for Eternal Fire, the generic chokers narrative is now well and truly attached to them.

Is it fair? Probably not, they’ve only really lost games we’d expect them to lose, but something does need to be said about how XANTARES utterly fell apart in the semi. Eternal Fire aren’t exactly a one-man army – far from it in fact – but you do have to wonder if they may have turned their 13-11, 13-10 losses into a win if their star player had actually bothered to play.

The second semi-final, fought between Vitality and Spirit, was nothing like the first.

A rematch of the IEM Katowice final, although this one was a lot closer than back then. The two teams traded dominant map wins before Vitality managed to close it out in a close last map to book their own third grand final in a row.

It says a lot about how strong Vitality are right now when you look at the scoreboard for map one. ropz had a torrid time, returning just one kill in a T half that saw Vitality build up a 9-3 lead. It didn’t get much better for him in the second half either, but at least he turned up for map three.

donk and sh1ro did all they could. donk had the most kills across both teams in the series, but in a series where everyone outside of stars struggle, the result often comes down to other factors.

In the case of Vitality and their current dominance, that factor is their refusal to play Ancient. In an era when their closest rivals are Spirit and MOUZ who both like the map, that perma ban is now a weapon even more powerful than ZywOo after a 3k on pistol.

That said, it’s still a gap that Spirit can close, and sometimes the firepower of donk and sh1ro will be enough to do that, but we still can’t help but think that a roster move may need to happen if they are to close it for good.

Tweeting a dead horse

In yet another spotlight being shined on the flaws of the Valve Ranking System, Lynn Vision have brought up a new issue regarding Major qualifier slots for the Asia region and its 3 sub-regions.

With the PGL Astana Asian Closed Qualifier underway, they made a tweet to expose a rule where Asia has four MRQ slots but only three subregions: China, West Asia, and Oceania, with the final slot going to the sub-region of the 2nd best team in Asia.

The MongolZ hold strong at #1 and are already seeded to head directly to the Major, bypassing the MRQ. Liquid are currently #2, but with the rumors of siuhy replacing jks, they’d lose their Asia status.

After this tweet, they were set to play against Rare Atom in the Astana qualifier, but they forfeited the match. The justification was that they weren’t confident they would hold that #2 Asia rank against other Asian opposition and that Rare Atom would be more capable of staying on top.

We can’t help but notice these constant holes in the VRS, and while the system could be airtight in the future, it’s been an ugly process so far. Striker from HLTV put it well: “this is all kinds of f–cked up.”

It’s rather funny that Valve implemented this system with somewhat obvious problems like forfeits not affecting a team’s ranking (aka The FIFA Rule) or changes to standings only being added after a tournament ends. But as more defects are seen, one can’t help but feel bad for these teams.

Every tournament seems to be a new game of roulette for which the team hits a new artificial barrier implemented by Valve.

Looking into the future for the impact of this forfeit, there are only two events for Rare Atom remaining until the path to the Lone Star State begins in mid-May with MRQs, PGL Bucharest, and MESA Pro Series Spring.

If Rare Atom crash in Romania and MESA, they may miss out on the #2 ranking, permitting FlyQuest to show up in IEM Melbourne.

Who are we kidding? They’re dreadful, but it is their home crowd.

The final stage: Acceptance

We’re not yet at the point where Vitality are entirely boring to see win an event, but we’re definitely getting there.

They’re far and away the best team in the world right now, and even taking a map off of them is an impressive feat. So what does it say about a team who takes two maps off of them?

Vitality’s win was impressive and all that, yadda yadda, best team in the world, ropz wins again, you know the drill; but the real story here is MOUZ.

We were a little bit in denial about how good they were, we have to admit. You don’t get to get rid of your young prodigy IGL (again) and all of a sudden go from top 5 to top 2. That’s not fair. It’s not real. Especially with Brollan taking over IGL duties.

We were struggling to think of a more obvious bad idea than that at the time. We were workshopping jokes like “this was as bad an idea as buying a Tesla in California” or “trying out League of Legends to help you calm down”.

You can see we never finished them - because MOUZ showed us. They showed us all.

They’re genuinely just the second best team in the world. They might have got goobed on map one 0-13, but they then took the next two maps against the best team in the world to set up what would have been a real marquee win.

They didn’t complete it – and actually, Vitality showed some serious ‘couilles’ (thanks, Collins) on map five with the game on the line - but this was an undeniable performance. We can no longer deny that Brollan as IGL is better than siuhy.

And, well, Spinx is better than Brollan, but we kinda knew that anyway. He was a tour de force on map two and ended the series with 74 kills, bested by only ZywOo (obviously). He’s really good, and it’s a large part as to why this move works.

MOUZ are really, really good. It just happens that Vitality are so good, that even when they win we write sonnets about the team who lost to them.

Who beats Vitality? It’s hard to imagine anyone other than MOUZ, or a 100-kill performance from donk, beating them right now.

Final standings:

1st 🇪🇺 Vitality – $150.000
2nd 🇪🇺 MOUZ – $60.000
3-4th 🇷🇺 Spirit – $40.000
3-4th 🇹🇷 Eternal Fire – $40.000
5-6th 🇪🇺 Natus Vincere – $20.000
5-6th 🇪🇺 G2 – $20.000
7-8th 🇲🇳 The MongolZ – $10.000
7-8th 🇷🇺 Virtus.pro – $10.000

🌎🇺🇸 only xitors in amerika

😠🤢 You lot disgust us

🎥 Scared of the SteadyCam

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

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