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.