The favorites of BLAST Premier Spring Groups

BLAST Premier Spring Groups is the first important CS:GO event of 2023. It has 12 participants and many of them are formidable, being ranked in the top 10 globally.

When a tournament features so many great teams, it’s always interesting to contemplate the possibilities.

What makes this tournament exciting to watch

In group A, Heroic will face tough opposition from Team Vitality and Astralis. It’s quite likely that Astralis will not be strong enough to contest them at this point, but Vitality have Mathieu “ZywOo” Herbaut. And his impact will likely be impressive.

ZywOo was ranked either second or first in the top 20 players of the year for the past four years. In 2022, only s1mple was better than him. If he plays his usual game and at least one more Vitality player does a great job, this team will be incredibly hard to beat.

In group B, FaZe Clan will compete with a stand-in because Havard “rain” Nygaard needs to take care of his wife and firstborn child. It’s not yet clear who will take his place but the most likely option is Olof “olofmeister” Kajbjer. Despite the fact that he has been inactive for a long time, his skills are still really strong.

But the bigger problem is that the overall cohesion of the team will suffer. You cannot achieve a high level of fluency with a relatively new player, regardless of how good he is. And at the highest level of CS:GO, the game is based on that. Strategy and tactics are just as important as individual skill.

Because of FaZe Clan’s weakness, it’s likely that Team Liquid will win group B. The firepower of this team is excellent and the drive to win an S-tier trophy is probably quite high. Liquid used to win such events relatively frequently. But since 2019, they haven’t won a single big trophy.

They were close in December 2022, at BLAST Premier World Final, where they finished second.

Can Aleksandr “s1mple” Kostyliev lead his team to a group win and an easy qualification to BLAST Premier Spring Final? Or will G2 Esports continue to play the way they did at BLAST Premier World Final in December? We will discover the answer in the coming days.

G2 Esports look incredibly strong right now, with Ilya “m0NESY” Osipov quickly becoming the new superstar of the team. If either he or Nikola “NiKo” Kovac does his job properly, group C should be theirs.

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