Today marks the start of IEM Rio 2024, our yearly visit to Brazil. The fans are notorious, the Counter-Strike is plenty, and the finals are best of five.

Okay, that last one just happened, but we thought you should hear about it. It’s not just IEM Rio either, that will be the case for all of the EPTM (Basically big ESL) events. The reason is that they want fans to get more content. But we know the real reason, it’s not ad money, and it’s not content for the fans. No, in reality, it’s to nerf NAVI. They can’t win a bo3 final, if those don’t exist.

Right, IEM Rio!

For most of today starting at 4 pm CEST there’ll be 2 games every hour until Group A’s lower bracket games are decided. More than enough content for anyone to consume in a day. Big games also headline both groups, with Team Liquid vs Complexity in Group A, and the newly cadiaN-led Astralis being tested by Eternal Fire.

That still leaves us with home teams to address.

If you want to see how the Brazilians do at home, FURIA, paiN, and Imperial are all placed in group A. Which is a bit lame, since that means it’s going to be very tough to see all the BR teams play in the playoffs. Though it’s hard anyway, PaiN plays MOUZ, Imperial plays NAVI, and FURIA plays FaZe. Hey, that last one doesn’t seem so bad. Too bad that if they win that, they either play PaiN or MOUZ. We can’t believe they didn’t put them in Group B, for Brazil.

In any case, we’ve got good CS coming up this week, and we can’t wait. Let’s hope at least one of the BR teams makes the playoffs. For atmosphere’s sake.