if FaZe qualify they’re going to end up in the same situation as XSET, just with a better controller player

ShahZaM has already said that he doesn’t want to play chamber because it makes it difficult to IGL if you’re not with the team and don’t have much util for info/delay, otherwise I agree that he would probably be a better Jett/Chamber in the current meta, and I don’t think he’d want to give that IGL role up to zander

Champs 2021 had a single-elimination bracket for playoffs, so maybe they’re just switching to double-elimination? An extra five days for seven more matches seems reasonable, assuming there’s a longer break during playoffs

i think they’re the only valorant team to have never lost a VCT map, so ig yeah can’t argue with that

Ok maybe I under-valued stellar but still I am interested to see what super-teams form post-Champions. TenZ moving to 100T feels like such a logical move from an org publicity perspective given his ties to a lot of people who are already a part of it

stellar played KAY/O, Cypher, and Sage in this match. Those are all agents that dapr has played many times

well I know that dapr does some mid-round calling for SEN so it’s possible that he could take over

I can’t speak for how much benefit stellar provides as an IGL, but what if we had 100T drop Will and stellar for TenZ and dapr? Asuna, bang, and Derrek have been doing great and TenZ and dapr have been the most consistent players for SEN in this LCQ, plus their roles already align really well with what Will and stellar already do.

they also went 4-8 on Haven defense against FaZe

SicK may be a good player but I don’t think his util usage on smokes was ever amazing

As far as I can tell, ban has lived in NA for a long time, and xeta has been here for 1.5 years so (assuming he is a lawful permanent resident) that would make him count as a resident per Riot’s VCT rules. Munchkin is the only one that is considered a foreign player currently, but you only need 3/5 to be residents on your starting roster so it’s fine.

they could even import one more Korean player and take back Sayaplayer from The Guard (to replace steel and thwifo) and they’d have a full Korean team that is eligible to compete in NA, since xeta and Sayaplayer have been in NA long enough to count toward the starting roster residency requirement.

hk/tw had a representative in the APAC LCQ, Griffin E-Sports

by my estimate it seems to be close to 5200, give or take a few hundred? the seats aren’t organized well enough for me to count any closer than that

This is mostly unrelated to your post, but if you want to make a pun out of nukkye being a rat (idk what happened) you could probably use nutria, which are part of “the family of spiny rats” according to wikipedia.

SEN took the first map 13-8 and were up 12-8 on the second. If any one of those next few rounds had gone slightly differently, no one could argue that it was remotely close.

Meanwhile, FaZe beat 100T 13-6 on the first map and 13-9 on the third, so I don’t know how that’s considered barely losing.

Plus, FaZe being the “undisputed best team” is just weird. They placed well in Stage 2, sure, but their style is just as unsustainable as XSET’s, relying on fragging power from their star players to get away with mistakes that would be easily punished by the best teams.

So yeah, I definitely think SEN has a chance, and with three days to prepare it’ll hopefully be a pretty close match, but I honestly think SEN has looked marginally better so far.

they should do a “best of X and Y agent” showmatch, like imagine a replication between Neon (Jinggg, f0rsakeN, Rb, Derialy, Victor) and Jett (Sayf, aspas, Shao, ardiis, Cryocells). it would just be complete chaos, no cool strats just go kill

also i just took the top ACS players from Copenhagen, i’m not here to debate who’s the best Jett/Neon player

After this game, KRÜ is now 7-0 against Brazilian teams. In the Upper Final, they either win and continue their flawless run or lose and have a 7-1 record. In either case, BR fans will be mocked so it’s a lose-lose situation

EDIT: don’t know why I said tomorrow, that match is in like five days

don’t worry we’ll get -stellar -Will +nAts +Chronicle ez

Fun fact: vanity played 8 agents in 11 maps during the Stage 2 Group Stage this year. Not sure how many agents he has played overall in VCT since C9 and V1 both occasionally join Knights/NSG tournaments, but it’s still a lot

I think ONS is pretty overrated, they had one win over DRX in Stage 1 but I don’t think they’re even the best Korean team in LCQ anymore, so I hope EDG wins cause it’ll be more hype

Asuna plays on like 0.52 sensitivity (when converted to 800 dpi)

ScreaM has literally only played Raze in his last 18 maps so I don’t think that qualifies as flex

It’ll be more hype if we have SEN v 100T later, so just let SEN win a couple more matches and boom easy 1M

You can check that stat on vlr, he won a 1v1 against bdog on round 31 of Fracture yesterday apparently

? 144 in the past seven hours

https://mobile.twitter.com/d00mbr0s/status/1501926820144242701. He was added as a substitute during Stage 1, and played in place of ardiis for some matches, but I don’t think he was ever supposed to be on the main roster

I think SR is pretty vulnerable when bdog isn’t popping off, so that’s a possibility. C9 is a bit scarier just because they have more players that can carry, but tbh I don’t think FaZe/EG looked much better than TGRD so 100T/NRG are still the biggest threats in my mind.

“not taking a game serious” and “practicing 6 days a week” seem like contradictory statements

He appeared in a clip on Sentinels’ twitter a couple weeks ago (in their LCQ house), so maybe he’s just hanging out in that area until he’s ready to compete again? Either that or he just went to visit his friends and returned home to deal with his own problems.

If we’re looking at Masters/Champions matches, the team pairs that have played each other more than twice are OPTC/LLL, OPTC/KRÜ, OPTC/XIA, and TL/KRÜ. OPTC/KRÜ and TL/KRÜ don’t really count cause KRÜ has a 0-12 record for those maps, but I think OPTC/LLL (6-3) and OPTC/XIA (5-4) are valid.

haven ascent breeze

definitely the C9 lower bracket run imo, feels much more unlikely to me since we have a better idea of how good C9’s current roster is

“Why should I do things to better the lives of others?” is just a weird question in my opinion. If you need a personal incentive to do charitable things, then you were never really a good person. I don’t know how to convince you of that, but I think most people would be willing to sacrifice a small portion of their happiness for their friends/family to be happier, and to a lesser extent I think that should apply to people outside of your immediate social circle. If I am in a position where I have the time and resources to help someone that cannot spare their energy, why shouldn’t I? They gain more than I lose, so that’s great.

6/10 players in this match have competed in a VCT LAN, so I think that alone makes this match more “T1” than any previous Pearl match

if anything, SicK would be replacing dapr since Zellsis has a history of playing Killjoy and there’s little need for Cypher these days. not sure where you got the idea that Zellsis is temporary, he’s not on loan from V1

These are the hours streamed by each team in the NA LCQ during the past 3 months. This is not necessarily indicative of how hard these teams have been working (consider the fact that even the most-streamed team has only achieved an average of 3.4 hours per day per person, leaving plenty of time for practice), but I thought it was interesting anyway. I could not find a twitch channel for EG Reformed, so if that exists I can add those numbers.

1. SEN: 1550 hours
2. C9: 806 hours
3. 100T: 526 hours
4. TGRD: 474 hours
5. NRG: 349 hours
6. EG: 336 hours
7. SR: 31.7 hours
8. FaZe: 19.6 hours

Another interesting trend is that the top four teams have all been to an international LAN, while the bottom four have not. This points to the possibility that those teams are simply streaming more because they have gotten more exposure and therefore get more out of the time they invest, and not because they care less about competing.

that must mean they’re going to take a 3 day break (probably before the Upper Final) because they always have the last match on a sunday

August 7th maybe?

To add to what people have already said: It was three rounds of Split, SEN were on defense and were up 3-0 when the recording stopped, both teams were using OpTic’s agents (Chamber, Raze, KAY/O, Astra, Fade) with the most notable role probably being ShahZaM on KAY/O. Don’t think anything else of interest was caught in that clip

the only team that used that at Copenhagen was OpTic, so I guess they’re probably taking inspiration from them

i remember a streamer showing how the “start streaming” and “start recording” buttons on OBS are right next to each other so it was probably just an accident lol

split is still going to be in the map pool for LCQ (according to liquipedia at least), and will be replaced by pearl for Champions

It’s worth noting that any 2-0 match will push the average closer to 50%, but only 9/22 BO3 matches during the tournament ended 2-0, so this effect shouldn’t be huge.

Teams at Copenhagen won 26/52 of their map picks, exactly 50% even though you would expect that they’d have a considerable advantage. Group A was ok, winning 8/10, but Group B only won 2/10, and teams in the playoffs were average again with 16/32 (though it was 10/14 in the lower bracket).

for Astra, I’d just make her smokes recharge like omen. still only four stars but if you don’t want to use a stun or suck then you could have an extra smoke for later in the round

Bind and Fracture have been strong maps for FPX, but if they don’t win 3-0 then I don’t think they can close it out in the last two maps. My guess is either a 3-0 for FPX (but very unlikely) or a 3-1/3-2 for PRX

Gambit going from 1st in Berlin to 2nd in Champions is not “falling off”. Neither is OpTic going from 1st to 3rd. Acend is the only one that really fell off, cause I wouldn’t even say that Sentinels did that poorly in their second tournament. People need to stop expecting so much and accept that the skill gap between most teams isn’t so huge that it can’t be overcome in a few months

i think they just get to go first in map ban/pick

A week ago I might have agreed, but OpTic has gotten destroyed on Fracture recently (4-13 against DRX and 5-13 against PRX) while FPX has done really well on it (13-5 against DRX and 13-5 against FNATIC) so I think OpTic will be a little scared of letting that through