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GUIDES
Simple Radar
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Evil Geniuses have been defeated by the good of esports.
NiKo’s decision to stay potentially has some unforeseen consequences, Asian CS isn’t having its best day, and a Danish AWPer has retired.
Of eight teams, there were three Asian teams at CAC.
So far, two of those teams have been eliminated and the one win they’ve got (combined) was against… TYLOO.
Wings Up got absolutely smacked by MOUZ and comfortably cut down by NIP in an elimination game to meet their demise, while TYLOO at least picked up seven rounds against ENCE.
They then lost two close maps to local rivals Lynn Vision in maps they really, really should have won, though, so it’s not great regardless.
Only two teams miss out on playoffs in Asia, and both of them were Asian teams. It’s… not been a great advert for the state of Counter-Strike out there.
In the upper final, we saw a superb performance from blameF to topple ENCE, playing with VLDN, with Staehr joining him at the top of the scoreboard. It was a complete domination on Overpass and Ancient, with a combined four rounds for ENCE on those two.
Snappi picked up 16 rounds in those three maps. Not quite as embarrassing on MR12, but still not good.
FaZe continued their winning streak with a 53 round BO1 against NIP, and a solid BO3 win over MOUZ as ropz went crazy to overturn a 0-1 map start.
That leaves Lynn Vision vs MOUZ for a spot against Astralis in the semi-finals, with ENCE vs NIP for the chance to try and stop FaZe’s reign - both on Saturday morning.
HLTV have reported that G2 are making changes.
But, it’s one that comes out of complete left field. It’s not HooXi, it’s not NiKo. It’s not even m0NESY.
Instead, it’s the unproblematic jks that, by all metrics, does his anchor role pretty well.
Australia’s last hope joined in August ‘22 so it’s unlikely to be a contractual issue, unless he’s on a very short 1-year ish deal.
So, why on earth have G2 benched him?
The conspiracy theorists will say this is all NiKo’s fault, because everything always is.
NiKo was supposed to go to Falcons, and when he agreed to stay at G2 it was under certain stipulations: Including signing his boy nexa as jks’ replacement.
It’s a stretch, especially given that the report says that G2 ‘were at one point’ targeting nexa, not that they are definitely pursuing him — and that there’s no confirmation that NiKo has renewed his deal, that still has a good few months left on it.
What really happened? We’re at a loss, but it seems like winning Cologne wasn’t enough to keep this inconsistent but stacked roster together.
Finances must be an issue, given that all reports indicated that G2 didn’t really want to keep NiKo on his (deservedly) gargantuan salary as the esports winter sets in.
But was jks really the one that had to go? We’re not sure about that, either.
We love rostermania as the next fan who hasn’t watched a game in three months, but come on. This is just change for change’s sake. The replacement better be far more exciting than bloody nexa.
We’ve had some travel problems that left one of our co-hosts stranded in hell (the Netherlands) last week, but we’re back with a bang this week talking about NiKo, mezii, alex and everything else:
Look, genuinely, we’re very sad to see Evil Geniuses blow up their Counter-Strike department.
It’s been a phenomenal source of content for us, and it’s going to be so much harder to take the mickey out of teams that aren’t Evil Geniuses. Who are we supposed to mock now? NIP? fnatic?
Actually, that might work.
Evil Geniuses bought the NRG team back in 2019, and things were all rosey. Instant success and lots of love from the American fans fell upon them, and it must have felt like they could do no wrong.
Four years later, we’ve seen their three superstars from back then go different ways. Ethan went to VALORANT, and EG probably wish CeRq and Brehze did too. Both fell off inexplicably, and neither seemed to come close to finding their form ever again.
EG dished out big contracts even as players fell off, and consistently soiled the sheets at big events. They were so bad that they had to request one of the tournament organisers to ask their talent to stop mocking them live on air.
Think about how insane that has to be.
The Blueprint Project was an unmitigated disaster; one can only assume the blueprints EG were working off were of the Titanic, or Chelsea’s rebuild. It was a baffling decision at the time, that we were all told would make more sense in time.
If anything, history has been even more unkind. It makes less sense now than it did then, and it made zero sense in the first place.
It’s a terrible thing for North America for EG to give up on NACS, in many senses, and an organisation with such a name and prestige leaving is never ideal - but we’d be hard pushed to say we’re that arsed.
They’ve mismanaged a team so badly to the point that the org who sold the team are coming back to CS in a better position than the team who signed them.
Game over, Evil Geniuses.
VLDN, that teamkill must’ve been bought beforehand with how scripted it feels.
