If you’ve been paying any attention to the last run of tournaments, you’ll know that every LAN win is worth it’s weight in gold for many teams. The looming VRS cutoff date of October 6th is fast approaching - and also happens to land in the middle of EPL Season 22, obviously.

As aizyesque spoke about in this week’s deep dive, it’s been a bit of a nightmare to keep track of who will make the major, and who’ll unfortunately miss out.

But is it really unfortunate if we don’t have to watch VP stink it up?

Shoutout to the main man Finn aka MischiefCS2 whose been keeping us up to date with all the bullsh-t. We’ll be using his data to get into what’s what!

EU VRS Predictions

As of October 1st, 15 of the 16 EU teams are pretty much locked in. Pretty much.

Stage 3 hosts Vitality, Spirit, Falcons, MOUZ and Aurora - or as we can more accurately call them - the same teams that are in every arena anyway.

Stage 2 is full of familiar faces too, notably G2 and NAVI, who are joined by perennial bottlers 3DMAX and Team Liquid, who, after a pretty crazy FISSURE Playground 2, they jumped from a 61.7% chance, to 99.9%.

Cracking system lads.

Rounding out Stage 2 is… Astralis?! This will mark their first Major berth since PGL Antwerp, in 2022. Some run for the greatest organisation in CS history…

And finally, our beloved Stage 1. FaZe Clan sans rain are at the top, along with dark-horse GamerLegion. The Ukrainian boys in B8, Jame and friends in PARIVISION, and finally - after a long rebuild and many failed attempts - NIP are BACK at the Major. Although they did pull out of Frag, to avoid any chance of losing LAN games, which is fair enough. Sh-t system causes sh-t happenings.

The last team in with a chance of a Stage 1 Major invite is Gentle Mates, after their impressive Stage 1 run at EPL. There is a minute chance that SAW can overtake them, if they have a crazy performance at Frag Blocktober, but it does look set in stone for the Spanish side.

Those that are missing out include HEROIC after their woeful performance at EPL, VP after their woeful performance at the Swedish border, and fnatic after a spree of online losses to questionable teams.

Americas VRS Predictions

For Stage 3 across the pond, FURIA and PaiN are locked in. Passion UA (NA) and Legacy are looking settled in Stage 2 also.

Stage 1 gets seriously stinky: MIBR, Imperial, NRG, M80, ODDIK and Sharks, not really the greatest pound-for-pound ranking, is it?

We can’t help but notice that there are only three North American teams in the entire Americas ranking, which really is a sign of the times for God’s favourite region (self proclaimed).

These predictions come after the end of FERJEE Rush, whatever the f-ck that is. But there’s still chance for some changes throughout Frag. Wildcard and BESTIA could pull it off with a crazy run at the BYOC event.

Asia VRS Predictions

These aren’t so much predictions and more just facts at this point, but the teams we can expect to see from Asia are of course The MongolZ straight to Stage 3. TYLOOas the sole representatives in Stage 2. And Lynn Vision, FlyQuest and Rare Atom in Stage 1, joined by Mongolian first-timers The Huns. Seems more interesting than the Americas tbh.

All in all the Major is looking pretty stacked, but we’d be remiss to not mention how much better this time of year would be if we had an RMR to look forward to. The calendar is packed, but so many events just don’t have the gravitas worthy of Major season, and that’s a damn shame.