VP's improvement and the impact of limiting the coach's influence feature among the talking points from the east coast of America...
ESL One New York: CIS teams come out on top in the Big Apple
ESL’s first $250,000 Counter-Strike: Global Offensive LAN on the east coast was a resounding success.
ESL One New York saw eight of the best CS:GO teams in the world compete for a first place prize of $125,000 and of course the iconic ESL One trophy.
The new Swiss format saw the teams face-off against each other trying to secure three wins and avoid three losses.
The former would grant a spot in the semi-finals while the latter would see them dumped out of the competition early.
G2 Esports were the first to fall, after a disastrous run of defeats to Astralis, Liquid and OpTic Gaming.
Swiftly following them was Astralis, before OpTic and Fnatic found themselves as the last two teams to miss out on the semi-finals.
This set up the hotly anticipated match between NaVi and Liquid, which featured Oleksandr “s1mple” Kostyliev playing against the Liquid team that he help guide to second place at the last major.
NaVi would come out on top, booking a spot in the final.
The other semi final saw ELEAGUE champions Virtus Pro take on current world champions SK Gaming, who finally had Fernando “fer” Alvarenga back in their line up after an injury.
Fer’s return wasn’t enough for SK to secure the victory, setting up the all CIS final between VP and NaVi.
The first two maps of the final were fairly one sided, with VP dominating Cobble and NaVi dominating Train. This meant it all came down to Mirage, and after overtime it was NaVi who came out on top.
With all the action now in the books, these are the key talking points from ESL One New York 2016.
VP have turned a corner
While you can look at VP’s ELEAGUE victory as the first real sign that they should once again be considered a top team, it is their performance in New York that cements it.
After years of being one of the best in the world VP had a rough year until ELEAGUE, performing poorly in many events and generally looking sub-par.
Even after their victory in Atlanta, many said it was a one-off and partly because of the way the bracket played out.
But in New York, VP proved that they are officially back as a top team in the world of CS, beating the current world champions, the second-placed team from Cologne and one of North America’s rising teams.
This was perhaps the first time for some months where VP consistently looked good at a tournament, and weren’t coming in off the back of some poor performances.
They have been improving steadily since the last major.
You can expect to see VP at the top of many tournament standings over the next few months, providing they don’t falter yet again.
G2’s meltdown
Go back to the weeks before ESL One Cologne and G2 were being talked about as potential winners, but now they look like they are in a bit of a mess.
Failing to win a single game in New York meant that Richard “shox” Papillon and crew were the first to be eliminated.
They weren’t even close losses either, as they ended with a -21 round difference thanks to two big defeats.
Both OpTic and Liquid beat G2 16-7 while the Astralis game was a closer affair with the French falling 16-13.
G2 looked lost in many of their games, and it seemed on multiple occasions like there was some communication issues, which is a sure-fire way to lose any round.
This could result in some roster changes for the side.
While they had a good run with the current line up, a few mediocre results and this horrific run in New York could spell the end for the current squad.
NA is a real contender
Team Liquid have gone a long way to proving that North American teams can compete on the international stage over recent months, but in New York another NA team proved to be hard to beat.
OpTic Gaming, best known for the organisation’s legendary Call of Duty teams, managed to win two games and only just miss out on the semi finals in New York, despite being considered the most likely to place last before the event started.
With Liquid directly invited many assumed Cloud9 would win the NA qualifier, but OpTic surprised them in the final to claim the last place in New York.
When they got there they managed to surprise everyone, by beating both G2 and Astralis.
Unfortunately they couldn’t quite make it past Virtus Pro to make it into the semi-finals, but either way the green wall should be pleased with their performance.
With OpTic showing what they can do – and the current C9 roster winning everything online – it seems like Liquid isn’t the only NA team that we can expect to do well at the ELEAGUE major in January.
That is providing, of course, that they all keep up this good run of form.
The pauses
Recently Valve introduced a new rule to competitive CS:GO that stated coaches can only speak to their team during the warm-up, half-time and during three time-outs.
A version of this rule was implemented for ESL One New York and the results were not favourable.
While the rule does do what it is supposed to, preventing coaches becoming an in-game leader, it disrupts the broadcast and flow of the game so much.
You can almost guarantee that after a particularly exciting round a team will take a time out to regroup, which kills all the momentum and hype that the broadcast had.
This was evident not just to those watching in person but also those watching back home.
ESL’s production also didn’t help this matter, as advert breaks were too frequent throughout the weekend and the panel segments were quite long.
Overall, this resulted in some incredibly long days, and an uncomfortable flow to the event.
While it certainly wasn’t disastrous, it did detract from what was otherwise a great event, so perhaps Valve should have a rethink.
