There’s all sorts of ways to lose rounds and games in Counter-Strike. But for a professional salaried team, this might be one of the most humiliating.
Right now the CS:GO world is holed up in Berlin for the StarLadder 2019 Major, one of the Valve-sponsored $US1 million tournaments on the global CS:GO calendar. The tournament’s been running for a week, with teams currently battling it out in the Legends Stage.
The tournament uses a modified Swiss bracket at this stage of the competition, with most matches being best of one. That means a single cock up can really hurt your tournament chances — and cost teams a substantial amount of money, especially given that the longer players are in the tournament, the more money they’re likely to make from sticker sales.
So you know what you don’t want to do? Lose a round and subsequently the map because you forgot to defuse the bomb. This happened to G2 Esports in their match against Astralis on Nuke recently. The Spanish team were already up against the wall, 15-8 down. In the game’s final round, G2 killed the final member of Astralis (device) as they were running up the ramps on Nuke.
The bomb was planted, so all G2 had to do was defuse. But for some reason … nobody did. And when they realised their error, nobody was close enough to the bomb to reach it in time.
Unsurprisingly, everyone watching collectively lost their shit.
The reactions from foreign casters is even better:
Oh dear. G2 are thankfully still in the tournament — and this one round wouldn’t have had much impact, since Astralis were ahead by a country mile. But it’s definitely not great for morale when you’re sitting just outside of the top 8.
The current stage of the Major runs until September 1, with the best-of-three playoffs stage running from September 5 to September 8. Renegades, the sole Australian (or majority Australian) team left in the bracket, are 0-2 and facing a best-of-three elimination game against DreamEaters later this evening.
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