Former LG CS:GO Roster Falls Apart, Tournament Struggles – CS:GO Recap 10/2/2019
Welcome back everyone to our daily recap of CS:GO news. Today we’ve got a look at the recent struggle for a lot of teams due to the tight ESL-DreamHack scheduling and roster changes, and the collapse of ex-LG’s roster.
As always, we’ve got a lot to cover today, so let’s dive on in.
The Struggle Continues
Following a weekend of high-intensity matches and upsets at ESL One New York, teams had to quickly board a plane and fly across the Atlantic to Sweden for DreamHack Malmö and the quick turnover has not been great for the performance of these squads.
Of the six teams to participate at both events, three have already been eliminated before playoffs, while five of them have all fallen to the lower bracket of the Group Stage, with Astralis being the only team to make it to a playoff qualifying match so far.
EG, in particular, lost three straight maps to Mousesports and the much weaker Grayhound Gaming to fall out of the tournament without getting a win to their name, embarrassing for one of the top three teams.
Liquid also fell into the lower bracket in their first match against OpTic, though appears to be righting the ship now.
As many of these teams are in the world’s top ten, the highly controversial close scheduling of the two events is definitely showing the toll it’s taken on the teams, and add credence to the growing call for TO’s to work together to make sure tournaments don’t overlap like this.
Given the two tournaments are run by the same parent company and have very similar invite lists, it definitely shouldn’t be happening for these events, though the chances of ESL making a change to the tournament schedule for the next year at this point is highly unlikely.
Speaking of struggles, ENCE, Furia, and MIBR have all struggled with their rosters since making their major roster changes after the Major.
MIBR in particular needs to get their act together fast, as a loss to minor South African-NA hybrid squad ATK in the ECS weekly tournament is definitely something we shouldn’t be seeing out of a top tier org.
Given they’ve only had a couple of weeks at most to figure things out, so it’s fair to cut them so slack, but if things continue these orgs are going to slide down the global ranking board very quickly.
Ex-LG Collapses
Elsewhere in the pro scene, we got some rather sad news out of the former LG CS:GO roster, as the team appears to have collapsed just short of signing with a new sponsor.
According to a post from their now former coach Zakk, the massive amount of pressure the players and public placed on the team appears to have created a mental block for the squad, causing the roster to break apart and look for other opportunities.
Felps will be going back to MIBR’s bench, Skullz will go back to W7M’s, Zakk is looking for new opportunities, and the remaining trio of Boltz, Nekiz, and Steel are all currently without a home, though if they can find two new teammates they’ll still have their spot in the ESl and ECS.
Hopefully, they can find some new members to keep the former LG CS:GO roster going, but this squad’s true competitive days are over at this point.
That’s all we have for today, thanks for reading. We’ll be back tomorrow with more CS:GO news, so stay tuned!
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