A sad day for Brazilian Counter-Strike

After all the hype and all the struggle that preceded IEM Rio Major, two of the most beloved Brazilian CS:GO teams have been eliminated from the tournament in the most humiliating way possible: in the Challengers Stage and with a 0 W – 3 L record.

Both 00NATION and Imperial Esports had a terrible run and were unfortunate enough to encounter some really strong teams along the way. Imperial, for example, had to play against Cloud9 in their elimination match.

Who would have predicted Cloud9 to be 0 W – 2 L in the first stage of the Rio Major, when they were expected to finish the tournament in the top four? Nevertheless, the NA team lost against Fnatic and Grayhound Gaming and now they need to win two more matches to survive the Challengers Stage.

00NATION’s Run

It seems that the lack of experience was fatal for this Brazilian squad. Epitacio “TACO” de Melo and Marcelo “coldzera” David are both veterans in this game, but their teammates knew very little about what it means to be on a big stage ahead of the tournament.

In particular, Eduardo “dumau” Wolkmer had a really poor performance in game one, finishing with a K-D score of 3-17. Coldzera didn’t do much better either: 7-17. The final score in this match against Fnatic was 16-3.

In the second match, against FURIA, it was TACO’s turn to play poorly. His rating 2.0 was 0.61, which is extremely low for this competitive level. The final score of the match was 16-6 in favor of FURIA, which is a complete stomp in CS:GO.

In the third match, TACO was once again in poor shape and couldn’t help his team very much. Meanwhile, IHC, 00NATION’s opponent, had two players that impressed the audience and finished with high K-D scores: +26 for Garidmagnai “bLitz” Byambasuren and +20 for Sodbayar “Techno” Munkhbold.

Imperial’s Run

Gabriel “FalleN” Toledo had high hopes ahead of this tournament, but his team ran into Team Vitality, 9z, and Cloud9. Realistically, Imperial could have only won against 9z but they missed that opportunity. With a victory against them, they would have avoided Cloud9. But unfortunately, only FalleN played truly well on their side.

The scores were 16-9 against Vitality, 16-11 against 9z, and 2-0 against Cloud9. This third match could have gone either way because C9 were in bad shape. It’s not clear why, but they clearly don’t like the Brazilian atmosphere.

The first map was Overpass and C9 won in overtime: 19-15. The second map was Vertigo and something similar happened: 22-19. Dimitry “sh1ro” Sokolov played a phenomenal match and finished with a K-D score of +28. He was the main reason why Cloud9 won.

Header: ESL