Clear Favorite: G2 Upset Potential: Virtus.Pro, Eternal Fire Waste of Spot: Lynn Vision
Clear Favorite: Faze Upset Potential: Fnatic Waste of Spot: 5yclone
Clear Favorite: Heroic, ENCE Upset Potential: Monte Waste of Spot: Rooster, Evil Geniuses
Clear Favorite: Vitality Upset Potential: Astralis, GamerLegion Waste of Spot: ORKS, Grayhound, Movistar Riders
Now that Legends stage is about to begin, it's important to do a quick recap of everything we know about the participating teams until now. A lot has changed since the previous major, we have new surprises and upcoming teams, as well as shift in the favorites. Let's take a look
After 7 months since Stockholm Major we are getting into yet another festival of Counter-Strike, this time we are up for one of the most competitive majors in years. There is no dominant team around like when Astralis or Navi won their majors, and there are at least 6 teams who have a good shot at winning it. But first, let's look at the Challengers Stage
The first region to kick in the RMR tournament will be Americas, this time joining both NA and SA in one qualifier. Only 6 best teams will get the spot in the major, 1 for Legends stage and 5 for Challenger Stage. There are a few surprises here from the open qualifier but for the most part it's all the teams that you would expect to see and we should see minimum upsets happen at least in the final results, there might of course be some minor losses in the opening bo1 matches
After almost a month of group stage and weird matches we finally get to the playoffs, where we are up for the most quality cs in a long time. This is the last big tournament before RMR kicks in and although the prize pool isn't particularly big (only 175k for first place) every team is serious about winning it.
First "real" tier1 tournament in 2022, prepare yourself for almost 2 weeks of great Counter-Strike! It's divided into 2 stages, 16 teams in Play-in that fight for 8 spots in the main event and 8 more teams in 2nd stage.
A rather interesting tournament, the replacement for ESL Anaheim that was cancelled few months ago and a warmup before Katowice for teams like Virtus.Pro and Complexity.