Counter Strike Shakedown #4

INSIDER ESPORTS (Feature) – Forrest "var1ables" Campbell releases #4 of his Counter Strike 1.6 Shakedown.  This series will look at happenings in eSports the past week and his opinion on what's going on.

Note:  None of this is the opinion Insider eSports or its sponsors. This is just my no-named wannabe-journalist opinion.

MYM Add a New Roster

Meet Your Makers have finally re-added a Counter Strike team to their organization.

They decided to add a team from left field: [u.s.b], a relatively small and unknown team but extremely experienced roster from Russia, which has some of the biggest names from the Russian CS scene in their mix including Dmitri "hooch" Bogdanov and Roman "ROMJkE" Makaro.

This team seems to be strong, seeing as they managed to beat out forZe in the grand finals, which many of you should know impressed us all last year at the WCG Grand Finals in Chengdu, China where they placed fourth overall. Hopefully they keep it up, and don’t suck as bad as the last team did at the end of their lifetime. And hopefully they won’t have constant roster changes that make it confusing to know who's playing for what like MYM/h2k did in the first half of this year.

Minor Changes

May lead to major wins.

coL added Andrew "Irukandji" Timmerman, who lead the team to three CEVO wins, a ESEAi win and a strong finish at almost every tournament they attended - with the exception of ESEAi S5 where they placed fourth behind Excello and Loaded, and didn’t leave group stage at IEM, which many consider to be the two events which caused the major roster change that led to evo/xp3 going to coL.

Hopefully this has the same effect that bringing Ediz “goodfornothing” Basol did for EG. First, they got a strat caller for WCG. Second, they got a very solid player which has good chemistry with the rest of the squad.

Finally, they have a player that has been able to, in the past, beat EG at previous events - which is something that every team in North America has been scrambling for: a solution to beat the ever improving EG.

This move, in comparison to some moves made by other roster - H2k and ex-MYM, I'm looking at you - makes a lot of sense on paper.

They got a solid player with proven experience with the roster, as well as a strat caller for the WCG event that their current one is unable to attend. They didn’t just scramble for the best fragger they could get and not think of the stability and the chemistry of the team, which sometimes is what really matters at the very top of the game.

ESEA Season VII

YAY MORE ESEA SEASONS. I love it when they announce their seasons, they are always so good, and almost all the matches are exciting throughout the season. And I'm not being sarcastic. Seriously.

Just like every announcement by ESEA it seemed extremely...  bland?

Like I didn’t see anything surprising happening - they changed the rule about cheating after TAU got screwed out of advancing to playoffs last season, they upped the prize money like they have every season and they dropped TF2, a game that could barely fill two of the league and keep them active.

Good stuff none the less, seeing as they are the only consistent league that can provide a LAN experience on a constant basis.

Tragedy Hits Counter Strike

I knew something like this would happen eventually. I just never thought it would happen so soon into the lifetime of the game. Antonio "cyx" Daniloski pasted on in a freak accident early Thursday night. He died from a car crash due to tire failure on his way back home from the airport, after he missed his flight to IEM Shanghai, causing Mousesports to pull from IEM completely.

In his short career he won IEM season II, WEM, Game Gune, and 5 out of 6 EPS Germany’s, and was a constant threat to every team he fought against.

Photo: HLTV.org

The worst part of it was that in his short three year career with Mousesports, he still was improving - even though his prodigious talent was already on par with Patrik “f0rest” Lindberg of Sweden's Fnatic and Jordan “n0thing” Gilbert of America's Evil Geniuses; he was only getting better as time went on.

Almost every event he would be in the top 10 players in KDR, FPR and went positive almost every event. In the latest Mousesports frag movie, he seems to have taken them over, being in almost every play shown.

I would like to give my condolences to the Mouse Sports team and organization, but more importantly to his friends and family who have lost a son and a friend.

Intel Extreme Masters Qualifier

Now you may be thinking “var1ables, you may share the name of a retard (and look like one), but why are you talking about a qualifier? Who cares about it?”

I’ll tell you who. Me.

You may not be looking but after the top two of underestimated and coL, something amazing happened. Third place. SK-Gaming Ladies.

Yes that’s right, a girl’s squad placed third in a mixed tournament.  Yes it was online, and yes only two international threats were present, but they beat a team which played in WCG last year, Blight.ca, for the third spot. That’s actually pretty impressive.

Good for the girls, they are showing something that most people don’t think about, that girls can compete with guys in eSports, and girls can beat them.  Hopefully they continue on with this and give what few girls in the scene are left that unlike real sports, there is nothing holding them back from competing with, and along with, us.

(Now if only they’d share all that marketing power….)

Intel Extreme Masters Shanghai Recap

After the loss of three of the big contenders for the event – SK-Gaming, EG and most tragically, Mousesports, Shanghai quickly went from the event to watch, to something that nobody cared about.

Who really wants to watch fnatic and Na’Vi steam roll some randy Asian teams and WeMade FOX?

Photo: HLTV.org

 

Well it looks like I was wrong. Right out of the gate the event was full of surprises. First the reigning IEM champion came in second place in their group, finishing 1-2 tying with WeMade FOX and TyLoo, behind TyLoo who was 2-1-0.

Sadly the Koreans WeMade Fox went 1-1-1, making them exit the tournament.

fnatic would not let any team best them however  and won 3-0, winning 16-13, 16-2 and 16-7.

In second place Tyloo.raw advanced with a 2-1 with a win over the new wNv squad and an unknown team INNER MONGOLIA.  This made a Euro vs. Euro and a Chinese vs. Chinese battle in the first battle of the bracket stage, with Na’Vi vs fnatic in one match and TyLoo vs TyLoo.raw in the other.

The first match showed a serious surprise - TyLoo.raw beat favorites TyLoo to advance to the finals in a stunning 2-0 victory, winning 16-12 on inferno and with the help of Liu "Savage" Bin, they savagely beat their fellow TyLoo compatriots 16-0 on nuke.  The fnatic/Na’vi match was much more thrilling - first map train when to the full 30 rounds 16-14, with Na’Vi winning in the final round of the second half after holding 15 rounds for what seemed like most of the half.

The second game on dust2 fnatic lost the knife round and chose the easier side - terrorist side. However it was not as planned for Na’Vi losing the side 9-6. Na’Vi wouldn’t let them get away easy though, winning the CT side 9-6 sending it to OT.  OT was back and forth with fnatic finally edging out the win on the first half 3-2. In the second OT half they started off there they left off trading rounds before fnatic closed it out 3-1 in the second OT half.

The third and final map would be delayed, much like the now famed Wimbledon match, due to darkness, as China Joy was shutting down their exhibition.

Photo: HLTV.org

The match would continue on the next day, but it seemed as if nothing had changed as it went the full 30 rounds with fnatic edging out 16-14 - with help of a strong 3k round by Patrik “f0rest” Lindberg in the last round - moving onto the grand finals.

The third place match went 2-0 in favor of Na’Vi dominating TyLoo on Inferno and dust2 16-13 and 16-12.

In the grand finals fnatic didn’t lose a beat, winning in two maps, 16-7 on nuke and 16-10 on train - taking home the $14,000 check and possibly retaking the top spot for the rest of the year. So this is to events in a row where fnatic - with their “new” old roster - has eliminated Na’Vi, although the competition was not as high as it has been in the past events.

GuX, despite all the drama he brought along with him, was the missing link they need to reclaim the top spot in CS.  However, as the scores show, they won by 2 rounds both maps they lost, and every map when the full 30 rounds showing just how close these teams are to each other.

Now it appears that we have two teams that are just on another level then the rest of us.  The only real competition for either one is mTw and they aren’t much to look at, when compared with these guys.

My Apology

I’d like to apologize to H2K-Gaming for something I miss-reported in last week’s shakedown.  I said that their team left for a better sponsor. It turns out that that report was wrong and the team is not looking for a new org, and is happy with H2K-gaming, at least according to their website they are.

So basically, my bad, I'll try not to do it again.