ESL Pro League S16 group C preview

Group C of ESL Pro League Season 16 is starting today and at least four of the six teams have a realistic chance of advancing to the playoffs. The favorites seem to be Astralis, although Heroic, MOUZ, and ENCE are very close to them in skill.

In groups A and B, we already saw the favorites failing to win and even being close to elimination. Between September 14-18, we will find out if the same thing happens to one of CS:GO’s strongest teams.

Group C details and favorites

The matches in group C will take place just as they did in the other groups. There will be three of them per day, starting at 12:30 CET each day. On each competitive day, the three matches will be sequential, which means that they will take place one after the other. On the final day, all three matches will be played in parallel, starting at 19:30 CET.

The participants in this group are these:

• ENCE
• Heroic
• Astralis
• MOUZ
• Complexity
• HEET

Complexity made a roster change in the last few months, benching Paytyn “junior” Johnson and bringing in Hakon “hallzerk” Fjaerli. Not much is expected to change but Astralis should be careful and not underestimate their adversary. They will be the first to play against the new Complexity roster and the risk for an upset is unknown.

In Heroic’s case, people are still waiting to see the big improvement that was promised when Ismail “refrezh” Ali was replaced by Jakob “Jabbi” Nygaard. Three months have passed since then and with few exceptions, we haven’t seen Heroic impress the CS:GO community with their new lineup.

MOUZ are ranked 10th in the world at the moment and their results in 2022 have been quite impressive. In theory, they are the second-best team in this group after Astralis, so they’re expected to finish in the top three.

With the addition of Valdemar “valde” Bjorn to their roster, ENCE look a bit stronger than before, but their odds of qualifying are still relatively small. One thing that should make their fans hopeful is the team’s victory against MOUZ, at Roobet Cup 2022. This happened at the end of June.

HEET are ranked 32nd in the world and are theoretically the weakest competitor in group C. However, this is a team with five French players and two of them are absolute legends. Audric “JACKZ” Jug is a former G2 Esports member while Alexandre “bodyy” Pianaro, the team’s IGL, used to play for G2 and LDLC. It remains to be seen if these two players will be able to upset some of the world’s best teams.

Header: ESL