Clearly, the most exciting part of BLAST Bounty is waiting to see who the teams pick to play against. Unfortunately, we have to suffer through four more games to get there. The horror.

In fairness, today’s games are alright, and they get better the later they go on.

It starts with a pretty forgettable one - you would actually have to pay for this newsletter for a breakdown of paiN vs. GamerLegion - while FURIA vs. Nemiga has a chance of being fun.

Nemiga have been touted by those in-the-know as something of a team to watch, but were pretty poor during the Major. FURIA are more reliable now than they ever were under arT, but they aren’t anything special just yet. They should win, but Nemiga have a shot.

It gets better, though. MOUZ have the unenviable task of playing BetBoom, who are wildly inconsistent, but have a bunch of players who can go crazy every so often. Ax1Le, as we all know, can be brilliant. Magnojez is exceedingly talented. zorte is as quick an AWPer as you’ll see.

They don’t even have nafany to bring them down any more, either. It’s Boombl4 now, who… well, he won a Major once. Don’t check what happened since then.

The final game today is probably the best one, though. B8 are always capable of an upset, and G2 are always liable to be upset. It’s almost too perfect an upset game. G2 have a new player and malbs likely moving into new roles, but B8 also made a change.

We’re not happy to see the back of cptkurtka023, but apparently, kensizor is better. We doubt it. We loved the Captain.

After today, we get to the fun bit. We want to see some spicy matchups! Give us Liquid vs. Astralis so cadiaN can back up his talk would be nice.

Who is going to gamble their bounty? Who is going to take aim at NAVI, or Spirit? Sometimes, the spice behind the matches is genuinely better than the games. Especially Astralis ones.