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CS:GO

IEM Katowice 2021: Narratives To Watch At This Major Event

IEM Katowice 2021 is finally here, with the Play-in event kicking off and the Main Event just days away. IEM Katowice 2021 is the first major event in the CS:GO calendar with so many teams involved for several months. Naturally, the best squads in the ESL Pro Tour are awaiting Play-in results to compete on Thursday. However, there are many lineups looking for a shot to make it into the big leagues. Here are the stories to watch:

Main Event Narratives

The Main Event of Katowice has brought many good stories over the years. Natus Vincere won 2020’s event, and previously, in 2019, ENCE had their incredible underdog babyface run to the final. Similarly, this year has no shortage of stories. Here are the best:

FaZe Clan’s First Real Test

FaZe Clan has rebuilt their roster once again. Only this time, the roster has Russel “Twistzz” Van Dulken and Finn “karrigan” Andersen. The team recently looked solid with nothing to lose at the BLAST Premier Spring Groups 2021, and that was without karrigan. IEM Katowice is their first real showing, and it is going to be a great gauge to see how they’re performing.

Heroic’s Enigma

Heroic is a team that really grew into their own throughout 2020. The roster eventually peaked at the second half of the year, contending for finals in several events. And in the process, building an actual rivalry with Astralis. The roster did partially fall off in some events, coming 5th-8th at events like the Global Showdown and CS_Summit 7. Katowice is an event that will define Heroic as either a team falling off or still hanging one of the best in the world.

Vitality down to Five

Vitality is a team that has prided itself with its six-man roster, tactical substitutions, and winning events with their gameplay. However, the start of 2021 has not been great. A fine resulting from an accidental restream of an event noticed on broadcast, Mathieu “ZywOo” Herbaut getting his lowest ADR game on record at BLAST Premier Spring 2021, and now the temporary leave of Dan “apEX” Madesclair has got the roster shaken up. Vitality has plenty of prep time, so the opening game for them is one to watch.

Vitality down a player at time their six-man roster was working effectively

Play-In Narratives

The Play-ins is the first leg of the tournament, looking to advance eight teams to the quarter-finals. There are plenty of teams in that pool scrapping it out to make it to the one of CS:GO’s most prestigious events. While there are many decent teams, there are a few high profile stories to watch.

How Will mousesports Fare?

Mousesports has gone from one of the best teams in the world several times to falling off the face of the earth. The roster is currently experiencing the latter. Both the aged veteran Chris “Chris J”de Jong is benched and on loan to FPX and karrigan has returned to FaZe Clan. With the veterans out, there are plenty of young talent fending for themselves. Add in the new IGL and the roster is interesting. The question is has Robin “ropz” Kool graduated from young star to the star player and now veteran of the mousesports roster in time?

Karrigan returns to FaZe after several years of absence

The CIS Beast Awakens

Team Spirit, Virtus.pro, and Gambit are three teams on the rise in recent months. The tier 2 Russian squads have made it out of their region and began stomping teams like BIG, mousesports, and others in international online events. Both teams now arrive at their biggest challenge yet: IEM Katowice. Both teams have a darkhorse atmosphere to them, and it will be interesting to follow the growth of new CIS threats in the global scene. There is definitely potential for all these teams to break through the Play-Ins into the Main Event of IEM Katowice 2021.

Can Complexity Keep Up Appearances?

Complexity is a mixed-result team that has been in a weird spot since Owen β€œoBo” Schlatter left the team. The roster has rebuilt and recently won its group in the BLAST Premier Spring 2021. But now there are many more teams to face off against at of CS:GO’s biggest events. The question does the team have what it takes to keep up its appearances? the Play-Ins will be a perfect benchmark.

Stay tuned to Dartfrog for all the latest news and analysis on CS:GO and follow us on our Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitch.  Image via ESL Gaming

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CS:GO

Heroic and EG win ESL One Cologne

Heroic and Evil Geniuses are your ESL One Cologne Champions after they both took down their opposition in the EU and NA Online events. Both teams put in fantastic work and show the world why they are winning the majority of their games over the last few months.

Heroic win EU

Heroic have put in the work over the last few months of the online era. The team was approaching around 70% win ratio over the last few months before the player break, and this trajectory only carried on into Cologne. The team returned for the DreamHack Open Master Summer event where they finished second place. With the hype from that tournament, they transitioned into a successful team for Cologne.

The most impressive thing about Heroic is that they had to win the event, facing off against the likes of Fnatic in the Lower Bracket and Team Vitality in the final. What makes the event even better is they beat Team Vitality 3-0, which is really unprecedented. With this victory, Heroic become the first Danish team to win an ESL One event, granting them a historic status within Denmark.

Heroic’s map results were quite extraordinary as well. Heroic won Mirage 16-7, Inferno 16-13 and Nuke 16-9. This is incredibly exciting considering that these are some of the more popular maps in CS:GO right now, and Team Vitality has some excellent firepower and strategy as they one of the better teams in CS:GO.

However, Heroic has had some wind knocked out their sails. Heroic’s coach has been found to have abused a spectating bug during the DreamHack Masters Summer event. He was caught abusing a bug where the spectator camera was allowed to stay in a position the following round. This meant that the coach was allowed to get free information in live rounds. Because of this, ESL has banned their coach for a year, leading to him being benched from the team. This is serious allegations, and definitely one to watch as we pay closer attention to Heroic in the coming events.

ESL has ruled that Heroic, MiBR and Hardlegion abused the bug in recent tournaments.

EG win ESL One Cologne clean

On the other side of the Atlantic, Evil Geniuses beat Team Liquid 3-2 after an intense series between two rivals. Both teams ended up trading map after map, where Evil Geniuses earned their series victory on map 5. To top it off, both teams had really close map results as well. This was an incredible series, showing that North American CS:GO us getting their top tier rivalries back.

After a period of struggle for Team Liquid, they came bouncing back in the Final. Team Liquid had a slow start getting to the top of the scene after Evil Geniuses battered them in the Group Stages and Cloud 9 took a map off them in the elimination round. However, the more the tournament went on, the more Team Liquid found their footing.

Evil Geniuses found themselves taking the first map of the series on Nuke 19-16 after Team Liquid had only been battered 16-9 on Nuke by EG in their group stage encounter. Moving on, Liquid had a nice map of Vertigo with a 16-9 map win. Team Liquid dominated the T side of Vertigo, showing the world how exactly the T side can run away with the map.

Team Liquid with great gameplay on Vertigo

The theme of the series came back to haunt Team Liquid. EG would once again get a map pick, with yet another close scoreline on Inferno. This map was another 16-12 map, with Evil Geniuses taking the map, bringing them to the series point. Although, TeamLiquid was not going to be eliminated that easily. Mirage was the following map and team Liquid dominated that showing 16-6. Finally, it was time for the decider on Dust II.

Dust II went yet another 16-12 victory, with EG coming in clutch and taking the trophy. Yet again, EG takes another trophy in North America and maintain their dominance over Team Liquid. The only thing to note on this front is that EG has some work to do as this newly fired up Team Liquid roster is making it their rivalry really competitive once again.

EG are your ESL One Cologne Champions.

Stay tuned to Dartfrog for all the latest news and analysis on CS:GO and follow us on our Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitch. Image via ESL.

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CS:GO

ESL One Cologne 2020 Europe – Who made it out?

ESL One Cologne 2020 Europe is now halfway through with the Group Stages concluding 26th August 2020. The event has had a long group sage, with two groups going through a losers bracket round for 16 teams. With the dust settled, only eight teams remain heading into the playoffs. Let’s take a look at the story so far.

Group A Upper Bracket

Despite ESL One Cologne 2020 Europe being online, the magic of the event still exists. In a twist of fate, Sprout was surprisingly the first team to make it out of Group A. They beat teams like BIG, and OG to make it out of the group in the Upper Bracket. In both situations, Sprout was definitely the underdog in those scenarios. They somehow manage to compete against the world number 1 in BIG really close, winning 16-12 on Mirage then 19-16 on Nuke. The OG series was much closer, beating OG 16-9 on Train, then losing 16-13 on Mirage before winning 16-3 on Nuke. This is exactly the magic events like these can bring out in teams.

Read More: BIG exit ESL One Cologne 2020 Europe in joint last place.

On the other hand, Complexity had a great showing. This is a team that has been growing ever more slowly throughout the year, and this Group is a sign of their success. They began the event with a swift 2-0 over MAD Lions winning Overpass 16-3 then going 22-20 on Nuke. Then the surprise came against Natus Vincere, were they won 16-9 on Dust II and 16-8 on Nuke.

blameF showing how good Complexity are in 2020

Group A Lower Bracket

Moving into the Lower Bracket, Ninjas in Pyjamas had a storyline to follow. They too managed to beat BIG in the first round of the Lower Bracket and Na’Vi in the second round of the Lower Bracket. The big series finished 2-1, and NiP had to play catch up for most of the series. BIG won the first map on Vertigo 16-5, so NiP gave it their all on Nuke to win 28-26. Finally, NiP won Mirage 16-7. But the real surprise came from Na’Vi. NiP beat Na’Vi on Overpass 16-9 followed by a thrashing on Train 16-3. Both of these results are quite surprising, considering the talent in Na’Vi. Either way, congrats to NiP for making it through a difficult Lower Bracket.

NiP had a stunning performance against Natus Vincere.

OG had a relatively short run in the Lower Bracket after only fighting through one round against MAD Lions. As expected, OG mad quick work of MAD Lions with 16-10 victory on Nuke and 16-9 on Dust II.

Group B Upper Bracket

Astralis has come into ESL Once Cologne 2020 Europe with an almost brand-new team. The roster has two stand-ins with Lucas “Bubzkji” Andersen and Patrick “es3tag” Hansen temporarily standing in for sickness and leave. Considering the previous stand-in results for Astralis, these two players have put in work so far. Astralis dismantled Fnatic 16-5 on Nuke and 19-17 on Train. Moving on, they trashed Vitality 16-8 on Nuke and 16-7 on Dust II. Astralis has new life with their upcoming stars on their roster.

In the closest Upper Bracket Round yet, G2 Esports pulled through. G2 Esports warmup was against MiBR who they put to bed instantly. G2 won Vertigo 16-2 and Inferno 16-4. Their real challenge was against Heroic, which brought them to the edge. Heroic won Nuke 16-7, with G2 Esports winning Vertigo 16-7 and Mirage 19-17. Heroic was in the lead for the most part of Mirage but G2 pulled through (we think KennyS really wanted to watch the PSG Champions League Final match).

AmaNEK with the insane clutch to get G2 the round.

Group B Lower Bracket

The Group B Lower Bracket has the same level of excitement and disappointment as Group A. Heroic popped a NiP here by taking down Fnatic 2-0. Both Vertigo and Overpass went to Heroic 16-11. This is rather disappointing, especially with Fnatic being as good as they were at the start of the year.

Meanwhile, Vitality and FaZe had yet another amazing series against each other. Vitality managed to pull through 2-0 in the series, but the results were super close. Vitality won Dust II 19-16, and won Nuke 16-14. This is exactly the high stakes action we want from ESL Once Cologne 2020 Europe

Team Vitality had some great T side Nuke rounds.

With the Group Stages done, ESL One Cologne 2020 Europe continues with the playoffs. The remaining teams are competing in the playoffs from Thursday 27th August to championship Sunday on 30th August.

Stay tuned to Dartfrog for all the latest news and analysis on CS:GO and follow us on our Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitch. Image via ESL.