If FNC beat KC, they also guarantee group victory, no? Which gives an extra point.

And dont forget that if teams get two or three wins in playoffs, they will also end up in the top 3 anyway, meaning they effectively can't overtake FNC. The only way FNC miss out on playoffs is if a team that is placed 4th or worse has more points.

Brother in Shanghai, like 70% of games that weren't 2-0s traded opponent's map picks. Teams prep more for their opponent's pick than their own, because there's more footage to work on specific anti-strats.

What the fuck are you doing spending money on esports betting when you clearly have negative understanding of the game?

Good article Chicken Joe, I just wonder if this was a good choice of headline. You know most vlr chatters can't read, as evidenced by so many people in this thread.

Personally if I were betting on esports, I would simply bet on the winning team, but maybe that's just me. Bettors stay mad and keep whining

Just read through vlr forums when FNC placed 4th at champs lol

Ah suddenly top 4 is the greatest achievement, classic NA mental gymnastics

Nah, they got outclassed this game, but they played well in the tourney overall and they deserve this fs

Right, idk how I missed that.

Crpiocells

FUT literally placed better internationally than NRG did regionally

There's a big difference between "Most teams have at least one cs player" and "85% of all players are from CS"

Let's go through the recent successful rosters

2023 Fnatic
Boaster and Derke played CS professionally; Leo, Alfa and Chron did not.

2023 EG
C0m and Ethan played CS; jawg, Demon1 and Boostio did not

2024 Sentinels
Zellsis and TenZ played CS; Sacy, zekken did not. Johnqt apparently has like 27 maps on record, so not really, but let's count him.

Let's throw the current top 4 at Shanghai in as well to get some more data
G2
JonahP, leaf yes; trent, icy, valyn no

GenG
Lakia yes; Meteor, Karon, t3xture, Munchkin no

100T (excl Boostio because I already counted him above)
None of them as far as I can tell

TH
Pati yes; Benjy, wo0t, Riens, MiniBoo no. Boo also has a couple of matches for some teams that as far as I can tell aren't even salaried ors, but let's be generous and count him as well.

That's a sample size of 35 players, and only 12 of them played CS professionally. That's less than half. And the number is getting smaller and smaller every year. All the rising stars like Benjy, N4rrate and whatnot do not have CS careers.

Yeah early Valorant built its esports on the back of former CS pros, but those times are over. The only ex-CS players that are successful in Valorant are the ones that switched early (2020-21) and have fully focused on Valorant for years.

They qualified to 1 out of 3 international events.

flair lmao

Damn you're such a rebel. Nobody but you knew

It's not even a Brit flag, it's an England flag, which is infinitely worse.

Prize money for the winning team is 350k. Even if it all goes to the players and the two coaches (it doesn't), that's 50k for each of them.

If you think 50k is worth passing on a degree that you almost have in the bag already, idk what to tell you.

If FPX had been on attack first, you would be saying it was embarrassing from FPX. Comebacks like this happen because a map consists of two completely independent halves. Both teams just had really good attack sides.

Wdym?? The old G2 team achieved something historic in the playoffs of Berlin 2021 that no other team had done before! They lost 13-0 to Gambit

The v in vlr stands for voetbal

A bunch of fellas from the Turkish countryside vs pan-American superteam, go figure

PRX winning the upper final to then lose to 100T in the GF is an actual guarantee tbf

Painful loss for FPX, but China is slowly but surely catching up, it's great to see.

TH deserve playoffs for sure, hope they can get some wins

When the shrooms hit a bit too hard

Probably in their mom's basement like all of us

The last time he played Raze was with Bratan Mix against Galacticos at the Mandatory.gg cup in 2023.

Him subbing in for Woot at the start of the year was planned for a longer time because it was foreseeable. Him subbing in for MiniBoo now was a very different situation.

When the sub that had like a week to practice with the team and hasn't been on a tier one team ever doesn't look like the best player in the world 🤯🤯🤯

It's not really about legal hurdles and more about how in the partnership program, orgs' job is to promote Riot's product, and controversies like these are bad PR, no matter if he's legally innocent.

Even if an org wanted to take that risk, I'm pretty sure Riot would veto it. Orgs can't do anything they want without repercussions.

Tbf cned was actually the only one shooting back against FPX yesterday, the rest of FUT looked way out of form

Point is you're a dumbass and you were very wrong

https://www.vlr.gg/314622/cloud9-vs-leviat-n-champions-tour-2024-americas-stage-1-w1

Same result on Icebox btw

The Chinese league never had the rating either. Afaik it's because China uses a different game client/API/whatever the technical term is, so a lot of match data that is used to calculate these ratings isn't available to vlr.

You're so smart bro, we all bow before your intellect

my bad bro

How is it racist to say sScary can't speak proper English?

He called himself that.

Weber my goat

monke clears

Yeah, but you could also just take it now without having to study all that hard and miss out on a few weeks of work and everything is much easier.

Plenty of professional athletes go to university after their careers. Not a majority, but you don't know him. You don't know what his plans are.

He can't take these exams when he is done with esports. I have a master's degree in mathematics and I can guarantee you if I had to take my biology high school exam now, which back then I passed with ease without even studying for it, I'd fail, 100%. It's full of niche knowledge that took me two years of high school classes to acquire.

If I'd taken my exams, then had a 10 year break, and then started going to university, that wouldn't have been a problem. Because uni programmes don't really require all that much prior knowledge. But these exams do, and it's ridiculous to suggest you can just take them any time you want. You don't even know if the school would allow that. Lots of places don't.

It's also not that uncommon for athletes in football (where there's a lot more money in it) to miss out on pretty big games for school reasons. Missing out on a couple of games is literally a non-issue.

And you're a kid who's never actually had a career in esports if you think one missed tournament will ruin your career. Get a grip children, stop listening to your dumbass brain worms.

He can do those exams at age 30 if he wants

Do you know that for sure? Because in a lot of countries, you can't just do your highschool exams whenever you want. If you don't do them at the scheduled time, you'd have to go through the whole last 2 years of secondary education again (in some countries).

Also it's easy to get into one uni subject at age 30 because university programmes start from the ground up. It's a lot harder to do several high school exams in various different subjects that you haven't studied in 12 years, because they expect prior knowledge from the last couple years of high school.

Missing out on one tourney isn't a big deal. Pretty much every player has missed out on at least one.

"IM 100% SURE MINIBOO IS AGAINST THIS"

What makes you so sure, trembo?

Goes into grand final BO5 while sick
Doesn't com
Goes 26-9 on the last map to complete the reverse sweep
Doesn't elaborate
Leaves without even looking at the trophy

Absolute Gigaleo

Just bet on the winning team next time, then you dont have to cry about losing money

Benjamin Fish my goat

It's actually Shartus Vincere

Whether cross-group or intra-group matchups should go first isn't a matter of "better" or "worse" format, it's literally just a subjective matter of opinion. I like the latter more, Riot chose the former. It's not the end of the world, but it's also not an objectively better choice. It's just a choice, and I disagree with it (as do many other people).

And even if it was a matter of objectivity, big companies can make mistakes, too. In fact, Riot themselves have admitted that this year's scheduling was a mistake and things will change moving forward.

Also, what is "stop assuming things" supposed to mean? I'm not assuming anything. I simply personally believe that these three teams are currently better than the three on the other side of the bracket.

Every single game between FUT/NAVI/TH vs FNC/KC/TL went the way of the Omega group teams. Every single one. I think it's difficult to argue that any of the latter three are better at the moment than any of the former three.

The main problem with the format is that at most two teams per group can make it, but there's three slots for masters, so if the three best teams of the region are in the same group (and tbh FUT, TH and NAVI are the best three atm), one of them will definitely miss out, even if they beat every single other team.

Since Split 1+2 combined give us a full round robin, the only choice Riot made was whether Split 1 would have the intra-group or the cross-group matchups.

If they had chosen the intra-group matchups, and then made these BO1 play-in matches cross-group (2nd of Alpha vs 3rd of Omega), we wouldn't have this problem, and nothing would change about Split 2. Imo this would have been the better choice.

BLG 4th in their group, NRG 5th, they just keep winning

Benny 1v5s sen with his eyes closed