Perhaps one of the most exciting majors I can remember is over and there is no better time than now to do a retrospective on everything that happened. The good, the bad, the ugly and the truly magnificent.
Turkish delight
Apart from being one of my favourite deserts, the Turkish Aurora team did end up playing some delightful Counter-Strike at the major. In my mind they’re a team that has been plagued by inconsistency and particularly a really bad habit from their main superstar XANTARES to disappear on the CT side and in big games. I had very low expectations from the team going into this event. Not because I doubt that in theory they have the firepower, but because I feel like they’ve been struggling so hard to activate their roster in a way that makes sense to me. The team often ends up relying on MAJ3R to suddenly have a crazy performance to get them over the line. From a viewership point of view, that is super fun to see and I have a lot of respect for MAJ3R for that reason, but it isn’t a recipe for longevity. All that being said, I think they did an incredible job pulling everything together even if in the end things fell apart against Furia in the quarter finals.
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Big Boom
BetBoom under Boombl4’s leadership is probably one of the most fun and interesting teams in my opinion. I have a big feeling that Magnojez is a better player than a lot of people are currently realizing, and I said as much going into the Austin major. That was apparently too early of a prediction, but for the Cologne major, it was finally time for Magnojez to shine. As an example, in Stage 2 of the major, these were his numbers:
BetBoom as a whole still remain a huge unknown quantity because of the late addition of Fl4mus and perhaps because of this chaos, it’s so interesting that they made it all the way to the playoffs.
9z underdawgs
In my mind 9z was until recently just one big questionmark. I used to follow the team a lot more closely when they had MartinezSa AWPing. But since his departure it felt like the team was just too far away from the shoreline to survive. I was wrong. And if you know anything about me, I love being wrong. I know 9z did good work in the PGL Astana event which was right before the major itself, but it’s always very hard to know how much emphasis to put on a single result like that. It turns out that wasn’t some kind of fluke. The team looked incredible and in my opinion it is one of the best underdog stories in CS2 major history. Individually they looked fearless, but tactically they were very obviously incredibly well prepared for every single match. The fact that we have a major in South America next year makes the whole situation even more exciting.
Vitality in shambles
Perhaps a bit dramatic, but if you consider that before this major one of the big complaints the community had was that the competitive scene was becoming boring because Vitality would simply win too much too easily. A team that just couldn’t be slowed down by anyone. In the end they lost a best of 3 to 9z, which remains one of the biggest upsets of the year for sure. It will probably require a big deep dive into what happened, but Vitality just didn’t look anywhere near as dangerous as they have in the past. The most noticeable thing from my point of view was how many mistakes they made. The kind of mistakes that a year ago, you couldn’t find no matter how many demos of theirs you watched. But the time we saw people fighting in spite of being in an advantageous position, we saw missed timings and a lot more hesitation than we’re used to. The chemistry was simply off from what we normally would expect. I have no doubt the team will bounce back sooner rather than later, but to call this major anything but a disappointment for the team would be lying.
Spiritless
Team Spirit remains one of the most interesting and frustrating teams to follow in modern CS. The fact that they have Donk is reason enough to watch every game and care about what they’re doing. In my mind Donk just is the best player in the world right now. But if Counter-Strike was a game where whoever had the best player won, then it wouldn’t be much of a game would it? Spirit have many of the same problems they’ve always had, when Donk is truly there and they successfully set him up for kills, he is essentially an unplayable force of nature. But when they fail to do that, they end up relying on the rest of the team more and that just doesn’t seem to work out for them in bigger moments. I actually think magixx has improved enough from a tactical point of view that I would personally give it more time before I really got worried. I still see a lot of teams that effectively counter Donk through planning and preparation, and I am not sure if Spirit themselves fully realize how much that is happening. Zontix on CT sides also appears to have become a bit of a liability in some of the matches they played, which is unfortunate because his role very much revolves around picking up the slack in case Donk doesn’t get the multikills. Overall you have to say they played the tournament without a coach and that probably isn’t ideal. I think I would say it was mildly disappointing because when you have a player like Donk, you want to win everything.
The Monte tease
I felt like I knew Monte were going to be better than most people expected this major. Partly because I guessed they would be one of those teams that flew under the radar for a lot of preparations other teams were doing. But also because I don’t think people have given Gizmy enough credit for his leadership of this time. Monte play legitimately interesting tactical CS. They do sometimes fall short in rounds where they simply dont have to do what they want. They sometimes end up not having a plan B when plan A doesn’t work out, and that can be frustrating. But for the most part, I think they come into almost every round with a strong idea of what to do and they’re quick to piece together how an enemy team is playing and how to counter it. Azuwu also notably had an incredible event to the surprise of many and Rainwaker is back looking like a strong rifler once again. I think overall Afro did a serviceable job AWPing, but I actually think his level is higher than we saw this event. I feel strongly that if that had been different they might actually have made it further than they did.
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Niko and the rest
Admit it, you knew this section was coming. Personally, I don’t care that much about the Falcons victory as a whole, compared to how much I care about Niko finally winning his major. I have written in previous articles about how I believed Niko was stuck in a negative spiral and what I thought had to happen to get him out. I’ve written about how I think Karrigan can make this team work. But for me the true impact of this situation started 13 years ago. Back then Niko would’ve been 16 years old and was playing for a team called iNation. I think I can say with confidence that I provided the commentary for nearly every single iNation game played in 2013. There was not a single doubt in my mind back then, that we were watching something incredibly rare. Niko’s ability to win games on his own was astounding. He displayed a crazy force of will in taking on opponents with much bigger reputations and who were in better teams than him. I would say even back then, Niko’s attitude on the server was one of “I don’t care who you are, I’m better.” It’s hard to explain what that feels like. It reveals itself in the split second decision making. In the pixel perfect peeks and in the ability to turn a fight against an opponent that most people would fear, into one in which they fear you. Some people will shrink away from a fight if they’re playing against a strong player. The feeling that on the other side of the map is someone who is truly great when it comes to both the tactical and mechanical side, can really cloud a players mind. Niko had an incredible talent even at 16 years old, for remaining very clear headed about what choices to make millisecond by millisecond. And he had the aim to back up every choice.
I would argue that the big downside in what he learned in these early days and even going into his time in Mousesports, was that if someone had to be done right, he’d have to do it on his own. While that can be an admirable trait, the fact remains that Counter-Strike is a team game. Not every teammate will be as good as Niko, they couldn’t solve the same problems he could, and the result was a lot of friction and eye rolling. I don’t think its wrong to say that what has made Niko a generational Counter-Strike talent, is also what could’ve killed his career and any chance of winning a major ever.
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At some point the rest of the CS field caught up so much that the days of Niko winning games alone were all in the past. So now you probably had the worst of both worlds. The frustration of losing without the odd moments where you just drop 35 kills and win no matter what your team is doing. I’d love to ask him sometime about the experience of this moment, if he actually realized that it was the dawn of a new day and that he’d have to try and play CS differently from the previous decade of his career. Regardless in the mind of most of the community, the Deagle shot that missed s1mple on Nuke went straight through the hut and killed Niko’s chances of winning a major. From there spawned a near endless string of disappointments and embarrassing losses to teams with much less firepower. The mental game was obviously gone and the unending roster changes made it very hard to imagine a happy end to the whole story.
I wasn’t blind to all of these issues. But I also couldn’t let go of the glow of the Niko I once saw. I would argue several generations of CS viewers have really never seen what Niko is. So I don’t blame them for not having much faith in him. But for anyone who was around when he was at his peak, I think you would have to admit that you couldn’t name a single other player in the world who has had the kind of consistency in rifling output that Niko has had since 2013, who hasn’t won a major already. For me Niko had to win a major. It would have been tragic the way it would have been if S1mple didn’t or if the original NiP lineup hadn’t won theirs. I don’t think anyone deserves to win a major, because that concept doesn’t make a lot of sense but I think Niko’s whole entire career was aimed at winning one and watching him fail to do it multiple times was horrifying.
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The fact that he won after re-uniting with Karrigan and with Niko himself finally playing great CS in a finals, is an incredible reward for an old caster who has been following this journey for a very long time now.
There will be plenty of time to celebrate Teses, m0nesy and Kyousuke. And we will certainly talk more about Karrigan’s uncanny ability to produce victory out of thin air. But for me this whole major was about Niko and the fork in the road in front of him. To one side a compilation of eye rolls and broken desks and mockery. To the other a broken curse and the fulfillment of a promise made, at least in my mind, 13 years ago.
I should remember to say that overall the event was great from my point of view, the on-air talent and the production aspects were top-notch and Cologne will always be something special.
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