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GUIDES
Simple Radar
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jks’ ghost hangs over G2 this Christmas.
Astralis are in contention for crisis team of the week, FalleN is literally twice donk’s age (not news but still insane) and Liquid are back to competing, hopefully.
Ah, G2.
At a time where Tottenham Hotspur have rediscovered their Spursy touch, G2 seem to have refound theirs, too, at CCT 2023 Online Finals 5.
While they’d managed to hide their penchant for losing to teams you’d never heard of by winning the two biggest IEM tournaments of the year, their recent move to replace jks with nexa has really put the microscope back on them.
And, well, they haven’t disappointed.
After HooXi dropped an 0-14 scoreline against Sprout (and still ended the series with the same amount of kills as nexa), G2 managed to just about squeak past them to face Aurora, who are famously hard to beat at these events.
Not 6-13, 2-13 hard though.
HooXi this time picked up 10 kills in two maps, with nexa and m0NESY only picking up 17, in fairness. At least nexa was keeping a good sense of humour about things.
They were still in, though, and only had to beat Guild Eagles - the team who famously are only good during Majors. How hard can it be?
Pretty hard, it turns out.
HooXi and nexa were still pretty useless, but it was actually NiKo who bottomfragged this series. BNE smacked ‘em 13-3, meaning in three map losses in a row they hadn’t picked up 12 rounds combined.
They did recover to beat them on Inferno, but the Eagles kicked them out in the lower bracket semis to really put the hurt on poor G2.
More importantly, poor HooXi, who is almost definitely getting kicked himself.
Every day in Counter-Strike there is a crisis team. The aim is to never be that team.
Astralis might have thought G2 had kept them safe, but their early departure from BetBoom Dacha might have put them in pole position.
stavn’s first game ended in disaster, with him getting completely dominated by Virtus.pro. He ended on a -20 scoreline, with the other half of the ‘Stabbi’ pairing ending on -12.
Being a new team and playing against the VP machine isn’t easy, and the Russians put up three very solid T sides and converted twice to push Astralis to the lower bracket. It happens, though. VP are a very tough team to play against.
On the other side of the spectrum is FURIA, Astralis’ second opponents. While VP are slow and grindy, FURIA are fast and explosive. If VP are Harry Kane, FURIA are Jamie Vardy.
If anything, Astralis handled the aggression even worse.
stavn once more struggled away from the Heroic safe space, while yuurih and KSCERATO ran the show like the good old days. arT’s back to calling apparently, and yuurih looks back to his best. Albeit, it’s only Astralis.
FURIA two-zipped Astralis and ended their 2023 early, but that wasn’t the only thing going on at BetBoom.
GamerLegion and BetBoom seem to have some beef, but it seems like the tournament organisers aren’t exactly helping to calm things down. There was controversy over BetBoom being able to apparently receive Steam messages mid-game, and BetBoom and Spirit were apparently allowed to go backstage mid game and get their phones.
That’s… not good.
The casting has been a little off too, with a few too many adverts in there, let’s say.
In the meantime, MIBR cut down BetBoom and Cloud9 to put themselves into the playoffs, and leave the two Russian teams to fight it out for a berth of their own, and GamerLegion got dumped out by BetBoom.
We’re slowly becoming more and more unhinged on the podcast, and we’d love you to join us as we delve into frozen’s move, Sweden and a small (big) quarter-life crisis.
Liquid has done it, they’ve finally announced their full roster. We thought we’d never see the day.
Unsurprisingly, the roster is masterminded by cadiaN but in more ways than one.
Obviously, he’ll be taking the IGL mantle for Team Liquid bringing in his Heroic style of CS. But to solidify that style he's also curated his type of players. We’ve talked at length about how good that can be on paper, but can they win? Or well, can cadiaN not choke?
A good first ingredient is adding winners, and who better to magically fix cadiaN’s recent string of losses than the magnificent van Dulken? Twistzz is coming home. The man with 2 grand slams, a major title, and the best hair in Esports has come back to where it all started for him. If anyone can stop put the W back in cadiaN it’s gotta be thsi guy.
But why have one winner when you can get two: enter zews. The Brazillian coach might not have done much in 2023, but two major titles don’t lie. As a bonus, zews is also familiar with the org, having coached for Liquid back in 2016-2018.
So, now you have 2 winners, but where’s the raw star power to grill tame? You know where this is going.
skullz enters the big leagues. The Brazillian powerhouse has been farming his scene with some obscene HLTV ratings on paiN, and now he’s ready to prove he can do it under the big bright lights of international CS too. If Liquid wants this team to win, they need skullz to keep up the momentum.
Even if he doesn’t, it’s probably worth keeping him around though.
skullz is Liquid’s ticket into the Americas RMR, which is a much easier path to the Major than the stacked European RMR. Meanwhile, Liquid gets to practice from their HQ in Netherlands against the best European teams. Bit of an advantage.
This is a much better attempt at cooking together a non-NA-focused Liquid roster than whatever that last team turned out to be. Keeping the Americas RMR spot is huge, and having the NA homecoming with Twistzz is even bigger.
This team looks great on paper, now let's see if they can do:
🇨🇦 NAF
🇱🇻 YEKINDAR
🇧🇷 skullz
🇩🇰 cadiaN (IGL)
🇨🇦 Twistzz
🇧🇷 zews (coach)
