IEM Katowice 2020 Qualifiers

We are rounding out the most recent qualifier tournament for one of the largest CS:GO events in the pro scene this week, IEM Katowice, and there has been some serious shake ups. To start the new Gen. G roster that finally entered into CS:GO was knocked out first round by a surprisingly solid Complexity team. The biggest upset however was the newly formed Cloud9, formerly ATK roster winning every series they played qualifying in the North American bracket for their first REAL major event. eSports historian and CS:GO wizard, Thorin discussed recently some of his thoughts for the newest lineups of Gen. G and Cloud9 and I had some differing opinions.

I generally agreed with his thoughts on Gen. G and how they could be a moderately competitive lineup behind a solid IGL in Daps. They also have some real star performance potential in Automatic, formerly of Cloud9, and BnTeT, formerly of Tyloo. Both Automatic and BnTeT were easily the standout players on their old rosters with BnTeT essentially being the best player to come out of Chinese CS:GO in years. Gen. G however, had to play with a Sick while BnTeT was still performing for Tyloo in the IEM Asia qualifiers. Was the shutout on Gen. G a fluke and should we be expecting more when BnTeT finally joins their roster? Yeah probably. They have a solid foundation with actual star potential so maybe IEM Katowice just wasn’t meant for them, but we can look forward to them showing up in the newly founded B Site league soon.

Cloud9 recently disbanded their old roster and pulled a 100Thieves by outright acquiring another full roster. 100Thieves signed the entire Renegades roster which was the highlight of Australian/New Zealand CS:GO and have become a legends team establishing a near consistent Top 10 status. Cloud9 was looking to do the same with the entire ATK roster. Thorin was, I don’t want to say harsh, but skeptical and speculative in his analysis of this former ATK, now Cloud9 roster and for the most part I agree. The two best players on the team are easily Sonic and Floppy while JT is a strategic, yet under performing IGL, oSee is an OK at best AWPer and MOTM aka Man of the Match aka the ballsiest name in all of professional CS:GO, is a Swiss Army Knife. MOTM is the type of player to play whichever role his IGL thinks will work and in the past has been a solid entry fragger on T side. The average age of the team is 20 so they are considerably younger than most of the upper ranked teams which is promising since they can continue to grow into their team play.

I agree with Thorin’s thoughts that Sonic is the best AWPer on the team even though oSee has taken the primary AWPing role, but I have a gut feeling that he will grow into the position more as they compete against higher caliber teams. He is absolutely right when he mentions that they are a heavily T sided team using gimmicky, fast paced executes to disorient slower pacer CT sided teams and this is pivotal to their success. They do still need to be able to find a working formula to win more CT rounds and need a deeper map pool. All that being said, they won every single series they played in the IEM qualifiers beating out the veteran Brazilian team of MIBR. Something I have said was totally possible, but Thorin claimed wouldn’t happen. This is Cloud9’s most successful showing in about 2 years, and Gen. G will have their fully formed roster soon, so there is a lot to look forward to from both teams going forward.