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GUIDES
Simple Radar
© 2026 TLDR Media, All Rights Reserved.
Cloud9 are down to just two.
A month of Counter-Strike has begun, a player’s career has just ended (and not in a good way) and Cloud9 are somewhere in the middle, also not in a good way.
Where were you when C9 die? C9 is kil… “no.”
Shortly after Electronic’s departure from Cloud9, OverDrive, the notorious CIS leaker, dropped the news that Perfecto and HObbit would also both be leaving the team. Fellow leaker Harumi even went as far asto say Perfecto benched himself. But if Harumi told us it’d be sunny, we’d still bring an umbrella, so do with that what you will…
This leaves C9 with only Ax1Le, Boombl4, and coach groove to build off of, which, sure, is not a terrible foundation, but what the hell just happened?
Playing with no AWPer is going the way of the 5 man roster. C9 has looked pretty awful at worst, and just okay at best. Changes were needed, and since Ax1Le is their star and Boombl4 is on a freshish contract, it makes sense they stick around. But who do they go for?
C9 has fumbled some of the biggest players in the region, and unless this team can perform above the sum of its parts (or they sign s1mple) they need to go international to upgrade. But that doesn't really help answer the “who” question… it might even make it harder to answer.
Welp, it’s not like their next event is in under a month so they can take their tim- Oh it is?
We don’t envy you, C9.
We were just about to sleep…
Late last night, Valve dropped an update when they thought we weren’t looking, and they really tried to bury the bad news.
F*cking Dust 2 is back in the Active Duty map pol. And it’s in place of Overpass.
For some reason, Vertigo, Inferno and Dust 2 are all in the map pool at the same time. If you add in Mirage, it’s going to be nigh-on impossible to get a veto advantage against ‘weaker’ teams now.
And… well, you have ban all three of them in pugs.
There’s a bunch of changes that are pretty cool - the new jumping kill icon, the XM10 giving you less money, the CZ and Zeus giving you more money. Great. That’s cool.
But why on Dust 2?
We already miss Overpass.
It seems like this plague doesn’t just hit our Premier matches, but also FACEIT.
Wonderful_Y, the #1 ranked player on the platform has received a two-year ban for cheating.
No, not that w0nderful. We know, it’s a bit confusing.
According to his HLTV page, the 23-year-old has represented teams like SG.pro, EC Kyiv, and eHawks. However, it was on the FACEIT servers that his supposed “talent” shined brightest.
But hey, he might have been wrongfully punished, right? Wrong.
The Ukrainian player attempted to defend himself after the ban, blaming the brief use of the sv_cheats exploit.
Unfortunately for him, his attempt fell flat, as a FACEIT admin promptly pointed out that all bans related to the bug were swiftly handed out.
Curiously, just a day before the ban, STYKO posted a video analyzing Wonderful_Y’s FACEIT demos.
Talk about timing.
In his closing words, Wonderful_Y stated that he “wanted to leave anyways to irl after faceit season”.
Well, we think we speak for most of the CS community when we say this.
Don’t come back.
Elliott has a Christmas jumper on and Logan has a Complexity shirt. We don’t know which is more wishful thinking. And there’s something about ESL Pro League.
TheMongolz are your new favourite team.
Stop pretending otherwise. If their bizarrely poetic tweeting isn’t enough for you, how about them packing Falcons and G2 into a blunt and smoking them?
910 has gone from the reason Mongolz went out 0-3 at the Major to a big-balls giga-chad super-soldier and outdone both SunPayus and m0NESY in a matter of days, while the rest of the team have continued to play their part.
They 2-0’d G2 dropping just eleven rounds, they 13-3’d Falcons on Mirage en route to victory, and now they have Vitality in their sights.
Vitality, as it happens, strolled to wins over Sharks and BetBoom, unsurprisingly. Sharks dropped into the Last Chance Stage with a narrow loss to M80, and TYLOO lost to both G2 and Falcons, albeit far too closely in the latter.
Over in Group A, a fellow underdog rolled up and smacked SAW and fnatic to book their spot in the playoffs. Welcome to the big leagues, 3DMAX. Well, welcome again.
afro and bodyy left the French scene and got their immediate comeuppance as their national counterparts clapped ‘em 13-5 13-10. Eesh.
FaZe breezed past Imperial, but were quickly felled by a very, very impressive Astralis team. The Danes bodied Eternal Fire and swept FaZe aside with Staehr and stavn topping the charts both times.
It turns out cutting blameF DID make the team better. Who could have possibly foreseen this?!
SAW dropped to both the aforementioned 3DMAX and then Virtus.pro, before VP got smacked by FaZe. FaZe meet Eternal Fire in the lower bracket, who recovered to beat Imperial and fnatic in three.
There’s still loads of Counter-Strike to come, which is great news for us. We have a newsletter to write.
Good news for you, as well, we suppose.
