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GUIDES
Simple Radar
© 2026 TLDR Media, All Rights Reserved.
Liquid rebuilt. Again.
You see what happens? We take a month off and the former president of the United States nearly gets assassinated.
He’s still having a better week than Complexity though.
We're back to regular programming, hope you enjoy this first edition back from the player break. We'll see you again monday morning!
NA CS is asking the big questions.
Questions like “Is it better to stay in a flawed relationship and hope it improves, or bedhop looking for the one?” or “Is the Ewing theory credible?”. Not questions anyone really needed the answer to, but big questions regardless.
For those of you who didn’t quite catch the metaphor, Complexity are in the flawed relationship, Liquid are sleeping around, and M80 seem to be doing okay without their star. It’s a complicated metaphor.
That is to say that Complexity soiled the sheets by losing to a malbs-less M80, and we’ll get to Liquid later. You heard us right, by the way, Complexity went out last because they lost to M80. After being up 11-5 on T side Anubis.
Don’t worry, NA CS fans, though. malbs is still killing people on G2. He strung together multiple (alright, two) good maps in his debut as G2 pushed past a surprisingly flat Team Spirit to book a semi-final spot.
FURIA survived by the skin of their teeth in the Last Chance Stage and even overcame their MongolZ boogeyman in doing so, leaving a variety of underperformers in their wake. The aforementioned NA duo, FlyQuest, MIBR, Sashi, and JiJieHao.
Wasn’t Kjaerbye’s finest showing, either.
The real fun starts today, though. With Spirit vs. G2 out of the way, we’re left with Vitality vs. a reinvigorated Virtus.pro, MOUZ vs. FURIA as a palate cleanser, and then a delectable dessert of NAVI vs. FaZe.
Yummy. It’s a big plate, and we’re very hungry. Just like Snax.
That’s definitely not foreshadowing for later.
Liquid’s search for a solid roster continues, but so far, all they’ve managed is “fluidity,” to put it kindly.Well, their last roster did remind us of a kind of gas.
This time, the players brought in to save Liquid are jks and ultimate, alongside coach mithR. While we imagine most of you know what JKS brings in clutching and playoff value, we’d be lying if we said we were experts on ultimate’s game. Though we do know that Pasha is a fan, which means we can only conclude he’s better than m0NESY.
ultimate’s merits as a player aside, because they’re TBD, there are still questions left to be answered.
For example, how’s the IGLing situation going to work out? If the word on social media is true and Twistzz is taking the reigns, we have no real idea of what to expect. He’s worked with some of the best IGLs the game has ever seen, so he’s got plenty of inspiration to draw from. But that’s true of more players, and not all of them made good IGLs.
But that’s not the most important question this team needs to answer, the most important question has to be: What RMR is this team with no core region playing in? Does anyone know? This has kept us up at night.
Liquid now consists of:
🇦🇺 JKS
🇨🇦 Twistzz
🇨🇦 NAF
🇵🇱 ultimate
🇱🇻 YEKINDAR
🇩🇰 mithR (coach)
True to its name, this summer's rostermania was packed with changes and shake-ups. If you've been outside enjoying the weather lately (unlike us), you might have missed some of the action.
Worry not, here’s a quick rundown of the most significant moves (and a bunch of honorable mentions):
G2
After the malbsMd transfer, G2 felt like their team wasn’t chaotic enough. So they did what no one expected. They signed Snax from GamerLegion. Even though we’re excited about the TaZ + Snax reunion, we can’t help but wonder… Hooxi died for this?
Cloud9
After blowing up their roster 3 months ago, Cloud9 has finally unveiled their lineup for the new season. HeavyGod, ICY, and interz join Boombl4 and Ax1le in what is arguably one of the most intriguing moves of the offseason.
Into the Breach
Into the Breach made one of the biggest splashes of the player break with their rebuild. Coached by the familiar Juve, the new roster features smooya, juanflatroo, Keoz, and BOROS. Honestly, this feels like a team that could either bomb out of a random CCT event or make Major Playoffs. Maybe both.
Monte
It’s the end of an era for Monte. The Ukrainian org has bid farewell to one of its longest-standing members, Woro2k. With the additions of STYKO, hades, and dycha, the team now boasts a Polish core, with only DemQQ hailing from the org’s home country.
FURIA
Brazil’s most controversial team also made some changes, bringing in skullz after a rough stint with academy graduate kye. To be fair, the poor kid was thrown into the lion’s den and expected to come out in one piece. FURIA also revamped its coaching staff, promoting sidde to the head coach position.
Alright, time for a rapid-fire round. This rostermania also saw:
And with that, you’re all set to impress your friends with deep ‘who went where’ knowledge. Our pleasure.
Our founding fathers - Valve - have blessed us with a new ruleset for tournament organisers that would make even the biggest law nerd weep. Yes, we know we’re supposed to be the ones who “understand” and “explain” it to you while keeping it fun. Well, we’re telling you: this one is hard.
We won’t bore you too long and give you the rundown right now: Valve’s basically made their Valve Regional Standings (VRS) an integral part of the competitive scene in an effort to combat franchising. There are a few special tournament types now, which we will go through in the least amount of excruciating detail (but it’ll probably still be excruciating).
Unranked Events
Let’s start with the easiest one, unranked events. These are events that fall outside of the rules Valve has set and that won’t use VRS for invites. Basically, your Tier 3 and below. The **only important rule here is the total prize pool cannot be more than $100K and a TO can’t have so many unranked events that their prize pools add up to more than $250K in a season. EZ PZ, for now.
Tier 1 and 2 Events
Okay, here we go.
Tier 1 means you have to invite from VRS, starting at #1 in those rankings. You also have to have at least 8 teams in your “Main Event” (read: playoff stage) and 16 teams in total. You can have more through open qualifiers, but you don’t have to. But you can.
Tier 2 means you can invite from VRS starting at #9 and below. Once again, you can use open qualifiers as well, with no requirements on the amount of teams.
Both of these need to invite at least 1.5 times the number of teams that will feature in their main event from the VRS. Read that sentence three times over, and then maybe you’ll get it.
Wildcard (A lot less wild than you think)
There are two wild things (three if you count your mother): Wildcard Invites and Wildcard Events. Wildcard Invites means TOs get to invite two “random” teams for every eight invites to their Tier 1 or 2 event. We say random because they still have to feature at least three players that were in a top-eight roster VRS-wise in the last 12 months.
Wildcard Events are a perk TOs unlock after organising three Tier 1 events. At these events, they can use as many Wildcard Invites as they want. Go crazy, go stupid.
All these rules make franchise tournaments very hard to organise already, but Valve felt it necessary to mention it again in their new rules as well. They also casually dropped an “oh and you have to announce your tournaments waaaaaayyy in advance now, starting 1st of January 2025”.
What’s way in advance? Two years. That’s right, two whole years.
Okay you can wake up now, snoozefest’s over.
