You probably get it from our recaps so far: This Major is WILD.
Even the non-elimination and progression games would have been enough to fill an entire edition, but naturally we give you the tl;dr, leaving only the agendas and the memes.
Liquid, aizyesque’s favourites for the Major, kicked off their campaign with a 16-2 loss to MOUZ. MOUZ then proceeded to lose 7-16 against BIG, while Liquid went on to beat NAVI 16-14. Makes total sense.
Vitality lost in triple overtime to NAVI and single overtime to MOUZ.
And NAVI lost two 16-14s in a row to Liquid and Cloud9.
Every single favourite — some more than others, eh karrigan? — has shown weakness at some point or another.
It’s all starting to look a little bit PGL Krakow, the 2017 Major where all the favourites took turn to bottle it and Zeus and HObbit’s Gambit snatched victory.
So, who will be our Gambit this time round? Well, there’s a chance it’ll be just as surprising.
Outsiders, since losing 9-16 to Heroic in their opener, looked good against NIP and Spirit. fnatic have the CPH Flames Major magic. Don’t forget chopper and Spirit too, who “isn’t going to give up until he wins a motherfucking Major.”
While Spirit are sitting 1-2 right now, their skipper still found time to shittalk degster, using more than a few euphemisms we’ve scraped the subtext off to hear what he really meant: toxic and arrogant. They also face Sprout today, so there’s more than a good chance they’re in a 2-2 game with it all to play for.
Heroic are also in the running, even if jabbi is still finding refrezh’ lurker roles difficult. BIG sit 2-1 with syrsoN looking like his ultra-aggressive online self.
With the onliners of Heroic, Cloud9, and BIG looking good and FaZe being terrible, are we sure this is really all taking place an arena? We’re getting Moon Landing vibes, just saying.
With FaZe out, NAVI, Liquid, and Vitality should be favourites but that doesn’t mean anything if they can’t avoid the banana peels of a terribly seeded Swiss stage. With NAVI and Vitality in the 1-2 pool, they’re far from out of the woods, too. They might even have to play each other.
After all this madness, there’s no such thing as favourites anymore: This Major is a blank slate.
Standings:
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