CS:GO Daily Recap – ESL One Cologne, Liquid, and Coldzera
The barbeques are over, the fireworks have faded, and with it another exciting weekend of exciting CS:GO action. Welcome back to the CS:GO Daily Recap, where today we’ll be kicking things off with an ESL One Cologne Recap and the aftermath of the Grand Slam in the “Cathedral of Counter-Strike.”
Liquid’s Grand Slam
Our first stop is, of course, with Cologne’s winning stars Team Liquid, who dominated the competition on their way to their fourth straight Intel Extreme Masters (IEM) event this year. This victory also secured the team their first Grand Slam, and an additional $1,000,000 awarded directly to the players.
With four IEM’s under their belt, and absolutely secure control over first place in the global power rankings, the Liquid dynasty is close to becoming reality. All they need to do to legitimize it is win a Major, a chance they’ll have at the upcoming one at Starladder Berlin.
Rest of Cologne – ESL Cologne Recap
While Liquid’s run at the tournament represented a legend in the making, several other rosters at the event had, to put it mildly, a rather rough time. With that said, let’s jump straight into our ESL Cologne recap!
Both Renegades and ENCE have dropped like rocks at sea since the IEM Katowice Major back in February, with the former seventh and second place teams respectively failing to win a single match at Cologne, getting knocked out after only two matches each. ENCE, in particular, was very surprising considering their ranking as world number two and may indicate some internal trouble for the all-Finnish lineup.
Other teams who notably under-performed include FaZe Clan, who only managed to beat Renegades before crashing out in the second round of the Group Stage in Group A in two match losses to NRG and Mousesports. Even worse, the team only made it that far after having beaten Renegades by the skin of their teeth, going 16-14 in their opening match. For a team so stacked as FaZe, this definitely isn’t what you want to see going on at such a large tournament, so hopefully they take the month off in August to prepare themselves for the Major.
NRG again continued their run of form, making the playoffs and falling out just short, this time in the quarterfinals as opposed to their usual semis. Still, the team looked fine in their match-ups and was just unlucky to get dragged against Vitality and the god-tier ZywOo in their playoff match.
ZywOo for Vitality
Speaking of Vitality, man what a tournament from the French team! While the team’s handling of NRG was already in itself pretty well-executed, their semi-final matchup against Astralis was the real story of the event. The match saw an overtime win for Astralis in the second map, but a major thrashing in games one and three that saw the Dane’s held to just 17 rounds across two maps.
While the whole team did well, the credit really needs to go to their star player, and ESL One Cologne tournament MVP, ZywOo who put on a monster of a performance this weekend. The young Frenchman, only 18-years old at the time of this writing, was the talk of the event, and had highlight after highlight plastered all over the CS subreddit of his insane 1v3s and 1v4s to clutch rounds out for his team. His awarding of MVP, while controversial for some, was definitely well earned, as the Vitality would’ve been nowhere near the finals.
Even S1mple, the famed Na’Vi AWPer, considered by man to be the best player in the world, went on the record saying, “I think that ZywOo is closer to my level than any other pro.” He’ll definitely be a player to keep an eye on in the years and months ahead.
MIBR and Coldzera
Beyond the hype that was Cologne, shocking news has been coming out of MIBR this morning. At the time of our video’s posting above, Coldzera, after teasing at something big going on behind the scenes, had asked requested MIBR to bench him from the team while he pursued other team offers after a rather disappointing last few months of middling performances.
In the short time since, however, sources have confirmed that Coldzera will indeed be leaving the team in the near future for FaZe Clan, replacing substitute NEO on the roster. Negotiations are currently underway to finalize the deal, but the move would be a huge boost to FaZe, offering even more flexibility on AWP to the already AWPer heavy team. We’ll have more as that develops.
DreamHack Valencia
Finally, we want to give a shout out to the women’s CS:GO scene, which had its largest prize pool ever this weekend at DreamHack Valencia with $100,000 in winnings up for grabs. The top spot, and $50,000, would go to Turkish team Beşiktaş Esports, who took down two of the world’s top teams in CLG Red and Dignitas Female to win the event. Female CS:GO has seen a lot of growth as of late, and we can’t wait to see where it goes from here.
That’s all we have for today, so thanks for joining us and we’ll see you tomorrow with more exciting CS:GO news.
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