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GUIDES
Simple Radar
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Where were you when Brazil was kill?
FURIA are importing even more Eastern Europeans, paiN are turning their backs on the Brazilian scene - what is going on over in South America?
BLAST Rivals is also on this week… a studio event with a worse version of the old BLAST format? Great…
Last Sunday saw the conclusion of the $10k Fragadelphia Las Vegas tournament. You may have heard of it because of NIP’s surprise attendance. Surely, they came because they love local NA CS, and not because they’ve struggled to qualify for anything else.
The NA vs. EU competition was set to be fierce, until M80 and Complexity both dropped out, leaving just NRG to stop the Ninjas.
A hard-fought semi-finals battle between the two teams ensued, but in the end, NIP took down nitr0 and co 2-1, with the final map going double OT on Train. They would go on to 3-0 Sharks, who forfeited their opening match for “personal reasons” or allegedly to avoid NIP until the finals.
We sat down with sjuush after their win, where he confirmed NIP’s main priority: “Our plan was to get some Valve points, and we did that.”
VRS points have been a priority for this NIP roster since they were formed without an existing core of three players, forcing them to start from nothing. Now at #40 in the world, the international squad is hoping to keep climbing with this win and their recent qualification to PGL Astana.
“We lost our previous LANs because we didn't give everything against worse opponents” sjuush explained. “In this event we just focused more on ourselves and just played properly the entire time.”
We’re not 100% sold on NIP giving ESEA Main team Ratajkowski FC the same respect that they’ll give their opponents at PGL Astana, but go off, king.
Either way, NRG HexT sees VRS-qualified events like this as a win for NA Counter-Strike. “It gives people who wouldn’t have opportunities to play against [tier 1] opportunities to see how different it is,” HexT explained.
NRG has their sights set on the upcoming NA LANs they’ve qualified for, the BLAST.TV Austin Major and IEM Dallas. “That was my first time in front of an NA crowd, that was super fun [...] so it gets me really excited for Dallas and the Major,” HexT said.
Unfortunately, no matter how loud the crowd chanted “send them home,” the Europeans still took home first place in Las Vegas. But look, the Ninjas can’t lose ALL the time.
An Englishman has won a Grand Slam and Astralis may soon be no more, it seems like nature is healing. Magisk is still crap most of the time, though, so not everything is right with the world. And don’t even get us started on FaZe and NAVI.
Also, in this week’s Overtime on Inferno:
We’ve all heard that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one (occam’s razor amirite…)
In Counter-Strike terms, if you’re unlucky enough to play Vitality, you’re probably going to lose.
BLAST Rivals S1 group play is a wrap, and we’re proud to announce that we nailed every prediction we made in our event preview. Now, where’s our medal?
We know, it’s not exactly a herculean feat, given the questionable format – win your opener and you’re in the (studio) Playoffs – and the less-than-thrilling team lineup thanks to wildcard invites… but hey, let us be happy this one time.
Group A’s opening round kicked off with Vitality convincingly taking down Wildcard – as if they know any other way. Mezii made sure he got his flowers too, dropping a 1.67 rating across Inferno and Dust2, as well as this sick ace.
In the other matchup, MOUZ faced paiN, and while the Brazilians - now at full strength with dgt on board - showed positive signs by pushing it to a Dust2 decider, they completely collapsed there, losing 13-0 and dropping to the lower bracket. Isn’t it great to be back in the studio, xertioN?
However, in their lower bracket matchup to decide who’d move on to the Playoffs and who’d be heading home, paiN threw all that promise out the window, falling to Wildcard in a one-sided series dominated by South African legend, Sonic.
In what was easily the most exciting matchup of the group – though, to be fair, that wasn’t a tall order – MOUZ and Vitality battled it out for a semifinal spot. The series started strong for MOUZ, but Vitality swiftly turned the tide, securing a 2-1 victory. We’re starting to run out of ways to praise Vitality.
Over in Group B, Spirit made quick work of FlyQuest – we’re still not sure what they’re doing here – thanks to donk’s usual antics. Meanwhile, Falcons’ father-son duo handed FaZe a 2-0 sweep, continuing the downward spiral for karrigan and his squad.
In the lower final, FaZe had to fight tooth and nail to eliminate FlyQuest, needing a third overtime to seal the deal. But don’t worry, FaZe – at least you didn’t lose one of your best maps to the Aussies, so you’re still doing better than NAVI!
The Spirit x Falcons clash in the upper final showed that you just need two of the greatest players the game has ever seen to rival donk’s demon mechanics, as Falcons closed out the series 2-1 to secure a spot in the semis.
And with that, here are the teams that have qualified for the Playoffs of BLAST Rivals 2025 S1:
🇪🇺 Vitality
🇪🇺 MOUZ
🌎 Wildcard
🇷🇺 Spirit
🇪🇺 Falcons
🇪🇺 FaZe
Brazilian CS might be dead. Might. We’re not really sure, but it might be.
Look at the two top teams in the country: FURIA now have two Eastern Europeans on the team, as well as a Kazakh coach in KrizzeN, and paiN have turned their backs to sign two players from other South American nations.
How did we get here?
Not even ten years ago, Brazilians dominated the scene, and with the rise of players like snow and insani, we thought we might see a comeback for one of Counter-Strike’s most iconic nations.
Well, we were wrong. In fact, we’d argue that Brazilian CS is now in the worst place it’s been since before the days of LG/SK.
The good players are spread out across four or five teams, and there’s very little hope of ever seeing them united. A scenario entirely the fault of the FURIA players for normalising terrible contracts and the organisations holding these players to exorbitant buyouts.
The reality is that these organisations now have no other option but to import players from elsewhere.
Fantasy building a Brazilian dream team will never not be fun, but the fact is that we’ll never see these teams come to fruition. It would simply cost too much money, especially when the chance of success is equivalent to the chance that the Earth is actually flat. Sorry, maikelele.
But does this all mean that Brazilian CS is dead? Well, no. MIBR is still Brazilian, and FURIA, paiN, and Imperial all hold Brazilian majorities. At least for now.
Instead, this could just be the jump-start that Brazilian CS needs as a whole. Whether it’s with EU imports or with fellow South Americans, what matters is that Brazilian teams may finally be competitive again. Whichever way you look at it, that’s a good thing.
It could also be the dawn of a new era for South American CS as a whole. One where the idea of “South American CS” means far more than just being a courtesy to BESTIA and 9z. Given how the US has always needed Canada to prop them up in CS, that doesn’t sound so bad to us.
Let’s just hope it isn’t coming too late for KSCERATO. That’s a name that deserves to have achieved far more than it has.
