On August 16, what the fans of competitive Counter-Strike have been waiting for for a whole month will finally happen – the break will end on the professional stage, which means that the audience will again be able to enjoy matches with the participation of the best teams in the world. The first tournament after Player’s Break will be ESL Pro League Season 14… 24 teams are divided into four groups, three of the best teams will advance to the playoffs. One representative of the CIS will play in the first “six” – Team Spirit… Top questions for the roster Leonid chopper Vishnyakov before the start of EPL S14 – in the material Cybersport.ru.
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Lessons from IEM Cologne 2023
IEM Cologne 2023, the first LAN tournament since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, has ended for a month now. The German championship also featured Team Spirit, which began its journey from the Play-In stage. And if the CIS team showed themselves quite well in the qualifiers (victories over MIBR and Sprout and a very tense match with Team Vitality, which ended in an offensive defeat), then Spirit lacked a little experience in the main stage. Both matches at the group stage of IEM Cologne 2023 ended 1: 2 not in favor of Boris magixx Vorobyov’s roster.
I’ll explain why I’m talking about the lack of experience, and not, for example, about a decent number of in-game errors that also took place. For Team Spirit, this was the first LAN tournament with a renewed roster. Say what you like, but for a successful offline performance, a certain preparation is required, which is possible only by directly participating in competitions in this format. The CIS roster for the first time “face to face” (the studio format of the tournament did not allow the teams to really meet) faced the best teams on the planet. To withstand the heat of confrontations with top lineups, obviously, you need to temper these very confrontations. Roughly speaking, Team Spirit has never played on LAN against eminent opponents, and therefore faltered at the decisive moment.
chopper at IEM Cologne 2023. Source: ESL
In the match against Heroic, which, by the way, also performed disgustingly at IEM Cologne 2023, the outcome of the meeting was decided in the second overtime of the third map. The extra rounds almost always represent a kind of lottery that Team Spirit had to play while fighting excitement. Even the phenomenal performance of the sniper Abdul degster Hasanov, who scored 1.34 in this match, did not help the team. However, at the same time, one cannot fail to note a very bad game from magixx, who played the worst LAN match of his career against Heroic. The Russian team fought to the last, but at the most heated moment they stumbled and went to the lower bracket.
But in the second match Team Spirit had to face off with FaZe Clan. Forgive me for the next reasoning about “experience”, but this match clearly demonstrated how important this notorious “experience” on the LAN is. FaZe Clan, who had shown absolutely nothing in the online era, suddenly felt blood in a match with an inexperienced opponent and remembered what it was like to compete offline. As a result, Team Spirit was defeated in two matches of the main stage of IEM Cologne 2023, and as a result, a rather offensive early departure from the prestigious championship. There is no need to doubt that the team responded correctly to the lesson learned: at the beginning of August it became known that the squad had returned to training, which means that the failures in Cologne only angered the players in a sporting way. And this cannot but rejoice.
A star is born
Perhaps the most interesting story inside Team Spirit is the ascent of the degster sniper to a kind of individual Olympus. In just a year, Hasanov has grown from a newcomer to the scene into one of the main stars, if not of the world, then of his region for sure. At IEM Cologne 2023, the Russian was not at all stopped by the fact that this is his first major LAN in his career. Degster made his debut exactly the way he wanted to – he showed the best players in the world what he was capable of, and he was capable of many things.
degster
This is not the first and not the second time that I praise Hasanov in my lyrics, and to be honest, I really want to believe that it will not be the last. The Russian sniper really seems to be the one who in the coming years can enter the top ten, and maybe even the top five best players in the world. Degster spends an incredible amount of time training, constantly talking about frantic motivation and shining time after time in official matches. The only thing that can play a cruel joke with Hasanov is the bar raised to the heavens, because now only performances of the level of his performance in Cologne are expected from him, and this, frankly, is hard. But judging by what degster does on his streams during Player’s Break, we can confidently expect him to be among the top 8 best players in ESL Pro League Season 14.
Light group?
With regard to ESL Pro League Season 14 specifically, it seems that Team Spirit has a real chance of reaching the playoffs. To understand why this is so, I propose to quickly go over all the opponents of the team from the CIS.
Bad news bears do not seem to compete with Team Spirit at all. The North American Counter-Strike scene is dead and not trying to fix it. The only meetings between BNB and European rosters happened during the Play-In stage at IEM Katowice 2023, but there the team lost all three maps without a chance. In a word, the most passable opponent for Spirit. Experts, by the way, think the same way.
The odds are taken from the site of the Parimatch betting company and are relevant at the time of publication of the material.
Odds: Team Spirit (1.12) – Bad News Bears (5.55)
ENCE… The Polish-Scandinavian squad is in good shape ahead of Player’s Break, reaching a 77.3% win rate over the past three months. The only “but” – the team practically did not play against the representatives of the top 20 of the world rating. Perhaps ENCE will compete with Team Spirit, but the favorite will be the CIS roster anyway.
Odds: Team Spirit (1.55) – ENCE (2.35)
Heroic… The Danish team already looks like a much more formidable rival for Spirit, especially considering the result of their face-to-face confrontation at IEM Cologne 2023. There is a suspicion that the Heroic performance in Cologne could negatively affect the team, while Spirit, as I wrote above, on the contrary, should was to learn from him a lot of important lessons. The chances in this confrontation, in my opinion, are approximately equal, but analysts disagree with my opinion.
Odds: Heroic (1.67) – Team Spirit (2.12)
Team Vitality… Another team that Team Spirit had the pleasure to get to know better during IEM Cologne 2023. The roster from the CIS also lost that match, but still did not look like a punching bag. The meeting turned out to be stubborn, and the result was brought by several specific rounds. It’s worth noting that the French are in the midst of a restructuring given several questionable transfers in the first half of the season. Here, too, I cannot call TS an outsider, with which the Parimatch experts will again disagree.
Odds: Team Vitality (1.70) – Team Spirit (2.08)
Astralis. It’s no secret that the Danish team is going through, perhaps, the worst times in their history. Long-term leaders of the team are delaying the renewal of contracts, and the Internet day after day burst rumors about the imminent transfers of this or that player. An important plus for Team Spirit is that she has already beaten Astralis, and she did so in the playoffs of IEM Katowice 2023. In my opinion, there will be no better time to secure another victory over the four-time Major Champions.
Odds: Astralis (1.82) – Team Spirit (1.92)
