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GUIDES
Simple Radar
© 2026 TLDR Media, All Rights Reserved.
Wanna pick up fame, FL1T... or Grim?
We’re about to blow your mind - did you open this newsletter… during a tech pause?
No, we’re not telepathic. It’s just a PGL event.
Our favourite time in the Counter-Strike calendar is here.
PGL is back on the menu, which means hour-long tech pauses, sound issues, and the occasional piece of 20th-century surrealist art for us to admire.
But it’s not all blown-out eardrums and glitched screens.
Cluj-Napoca 2026 is the most stacked PGL event in recent memory, so if you’re willing to overlook the more obvious issues - hopefully ironed out after the opening days - you might actually end up having a great time with some tier one CS.
Running in the ever-reliable Swiss format, the tournament kicked off with the favourites handling business comfortably. FURIA, Falcons, NAVI, and FaZe all swept their opponents in B8, 3DMAX, Astralis, and HEROIC. Elsewhere, MOUZ, Vitality, and The MongolZ had to work a bit harder to edge out PARIVISION, G2, and paiN.
Jame’s boys continue to prove they’re a tough nut to crack, even against the very best opposition, while for G2, taking a map off Vitality feels like their current best-case scenario. As long as SunPaypal is on the payroll, consistent AWP impact is something they won’t find. If only they had one of the hottest AWP prospects in the scene under contract…
Day 1’s real headline, though, was FUT. Stepping into the empty spot left by Legacy, they took down Aurora 2-1 in a series that was far more one-sided than the scoreline suggests. Outside of their signature Anubis - which they scraped through in OT - the Turks barely looked competitive. With dziugss leading the charge, there’s no doubt the kids are shooting hard. Not sure that’s much of an excuse, though.
Day 2 saw MOUZ cruise into the 2-0 pool as they dismantled NAVI, with xertioN topping the scoreboard. We didn’t expect much from NAVI, but a little fight would’ve been nice.
The rest of the 1-0 games were a bit more entertaining, as all three maps were needed for Falcons, FURIA and Vitality to join MOUZ in the undefeated bunch after facing FaZe, FUT, and TheMongolZ.
PARI’s 2-1 win over G2 led the 0-1 bracket, but the real story was B8’s 16-year-old Ukrainian AWPer.
No, it’s not segukawa - he’s already been shipped back to the academy team after getting thrown to the wolves in Kraków. This is s1zzi we’re talking about, fresh from Spirit Academy, who looked strong across his first four maps, especially against HEROIC where he posted a 1.42 rating. A solid start, but let’s not forget what happened to his predecessor.
Heading into Day 3, along with an exciting FURIA vs Falcons clash, we’ve also got a potential banger in MOUZ vs Vitality. It’s in a studio, so MOUZ actually have a real shot at this.
Operation destroy team - 100% complete.
Virtus.pro have successfully completely demolished every bit of goodwill and sucked all of the talent out of their roster over the last year or so, and with the news that fame and FL1T are now available for transfer, have speedran irrelevance.
Benching Jame hasn’t really worked out, but more importantly it was the replacement that flopped massively. electroNic hasn’t been a top tier IGL since… well, birth, and hasn’t been a top player since 2022.
It’s not just that decision; the signing, misusing and contract jail-ing of FL4MUS was utterly bizarre, ICY never really worked out, Perfecto has largely shown why nobody who needed a ‘support’ player went for him, and b1st and tO0RO…
shrugs shoulders.
fame and FL1T have been in the past a star duo capable of contending for trophies (albeit mostly Challengers), and remain the two highest rated players on the team, though they’re obviously not flying as high as before.
Letting them go is merciful, really.
VP are a case study in how quickly you can go from a solid top 10 team to complete insignificance, lose all your good players, spunk money up the wall and become a running joke.
Mind you, it’s not the first time this has happened to them; this version of VP was built following the dissipation of the ‘Golden Five’ (not the real golden five, yes we know, Thorin), and they’ve done alright.
Maybe lightning really can strike twice.
Illustration byFuffy, Source: StarLadder
So… who exactly is leaving Passion UA?
We’d ruled out kvem on the basis of him being the token Ukrainian, and assumed it was nicx on the basis of him being rubbish, but Grim? Yeah, we didn’t have that on the cards, and honestly - we’re not sure Passion UA would have either.
Surely not, right?
There’s just no way, if you’re spending all this money to improve your team via Senzu and try, that you’d ever keep nicx on the team.
But then again, from the perspective of NRG - who is reportedly set to be signing for - this move is an absolute no-brainer, and in fact, it might be one of the best moves in NA CS history.
Seriously, at this point, Grim isn’t just one of NA’s most experienced players; he’s one of their premium players, too, and there’s no doubt in our minds that that won’t become painfully obvious once he doesn’t have to carry the likes of nicx, cxzi, or hallzerk.
NRG are also on a high recently, having picked up a number of impressive results with their performances in Krakow, their Fragadelphia win, and qualifying for BLAST Open Rotterdam.
In short, this is the time for NRG to make the step up as a team, and in Grim, there’s arguably no one better they could make that step up with.
So, whether it’s Jeorge or Sonic (because it better not be br0), fair f-cks, lads.
Like all great Swedish players, a 19-year-old flusha started his career in a mixed team with a funny name - SY&b, short for “Swag, Yolo & b-tches”.
Do we even need to tell you what year this was?
After a short time in the Swedish semi-professional scene, Señor VAC made his HLTV debut in October of 2012, just two months after the release of CS:GO. At the time, little did we know just how much he would define the history of the game.
It was the grand final in the 14th edition of ESL’s weekly Go4CS:GO Cup (almost as prestigious as IEM Cologne, we promise) against German side n!faculty. Believe it or not, flusha finished the three-mapper at the top of the scoreboard with 52 frags, and was rewarded with a whopping 100€ in prize money for his efforts. Well, his fifth of the 100€.
But really, this match was laying the groundwork for his storied career, in a way. His teammates in this game, znajder and Devilwalk, would continue to walk alongside him through forays with Western Wolves, Epsilon, and finally fnatic, with which they would make an upset victory in the first ever CS:GO Major grand final just a year later.
Through two more Major championships with fnatic, failed international attempts with Cloud9 and GORILLAZ, and founding Swedish organisation EYEBALLERS, he’d eventually be benched and retire from competitive play in August of 2023. But his story doesn’t end there.
Like the Jörmungandr of his viking heritage, flusha’s last competitive outing would make his career full circle - on a Swedish mixed team with a funny name.
In November of 2025, megoshort would attend the group stage of Fragbite’s prestigious LAN event Svenska Cupen, where flusha and co. would exit the tournament after a heated game against Metizport, with a performance fit for a 32-year-old – dropping a 0.79 rating with 23 frags in two maps.
Now we wonder, which one of these other guys will end up winning a Major?
