The best teams in the IEM Rio Major RMRs

The RMRs for IEM Rio Major are about to begin and the recent results of ESL Pro League Season 16 can help us evaluate the strength of the top teams a bit better. Arguably, the real battle is the one for the Legend-status tickets.

Qualification should be almost a given for the world’s best teams, but that doesn’t guarantee that there won’t be any highly skilled teams left outside. The competitive format is more than ideal for upsets. All regional qualifiers use the Swiss System Format. This means that the teams will be playing lots of best-of-one matches.

If the first best-of-one goes wrong for more than one important team, in the second round those losing teams might run into each other. And even if they don’t have to fight each other right away, they might have to do it later.

It’s quite rare to have all the favorite teams qualify for a big CS:GO tournament when every single one of them needs to go through the qualification process. Given that we have more than 20 teams in Europe and North America that are regarded as strong, at least several of them are likely to miss the event.

What everyone hopes is that those teams will not be Natus Vincere, FaZe Clan, Ninjas in Pyjamas, or any other exciting competitor that we enjoy watching.

European RMRs

The European RMRs look tough for a lot of teams but the favorites are pretty clear. Given that eight teams will advance from each of these two tournaments, there’s some room for error but not that much.

These are the European RMR A favorites:

• FaZe Clan
• G2 Esports
• Cloud9
• Fnatic
• Astralis
• Ninjas in Pyjamas
• Team Spirit
• Sprout

These are the European RMR B favorites:

• Team Vitality
• Natus Vincere
• Heroic
• Outsiders
• MOUZ
• BIG
• OG
• Team Falcons

In the first RMR, the highest-risk favorites are Astralis, NiP, Spirit, and Sprout.

In the second RMR, the favorites that risk missing the Major are Falcons and BIG. Everyone else looks very hard to beat.

American RMR

The American RMR offers six teams the chance to go to the IEM Rio Major. The favorites are these:

• Team Liquid
• FURIA Esports
• Imperial Esports
• Complexity Gaming
• 00 Nation
• Evil Geniuses

There’s very little hope for the other competitors because there aren’t that many highly skilled teams in this region. Even among the favorites, the differences are huge. A team such as Liquid should have no problem defeating one like Imperial Esports.

Asia Pacific RMR

In the Asia Pacific RMR, only four teams will play and the favorites are Grayhound Gaming and Rare Atom. This qualifier starts on October 7. The rest are scheduled to start on October 4 (Europe) and 5 (Americas).

Header: ESL