Cloud9 had a good start at BLAST Premier: Spring Showdown, beating Rare Atom in the first round with a score of 2 – 0. Despite struggling on the second map (13 – 11), they seemed fully capable of qualifying for the Spring Final.
The only opponents that should have been able to stop them were Heroic, Team Liquid, and Complexity. After the first round, Liquid and Complexity were no longer a threat. On the other hand, the fact that SAW defeated Liquid clearly indicated how dangerous they were.
Cloud9 vs. SAW
C9 seem to have lost this match partly because they lost their confidence after the first map, which they lost 13 – 16. The second map ended 8 – 13. Throughout the match, Denis “electroNic” Sharipov and Kirill “Boombl4” Mikhailov struggled to keep up with the rest of their teammates. Their scores were 19 – 38 and 25 – 38 respectively.
These scores simply buried C9. Too much pressure was put on Abay “HObbit” Khassenov, whose decent score (40 – 36) was not enough to bring victory to Cloud9.
This defeat was very surprising in light of Cloud9’s recent success in the RMRs for PGL Major Copenhagen. To end with a perfect record (3 W – 0 L) in such a tournament and defeat Team Vitality in the final match (2 – 1) is quite an achievement. Going from that to losing against SAW shows that the current CS2 pro scene is very volatile.
The Portuguese team has been around since 2020 but most of their good results (and by that I mean B-tier trophies) came in 2022 and 2023.
Other Results
So far, BLAST Premier: Spring Showdown has been full of upsets. From Liquid to Team Falcons, many great teams have already been eliminated. But not all of them. Team Spirit, for instance, managed to win the first round against Elevate and didn’t struggle too much. This means that they could be one of the two winners in the end.
Header image credit: Cloud9
