Team Liquid currently occupies the 26th place in the global rankings. That’s quite bad for an organization of its caliber. But this rank, of course, is deceptive. First of all, it’s based on very few results and doesn’t take into account Liquid’s tremendous potential.
This Liquid roster is easily one of the strongest in the team’s Counter-Strike history. So the expectations are high. Recently, those expectations were met in the qualifiers for IEM Dallas 2024. Team Liquid won the NA qualifier despite losing the opening match. They had to beat all of the other three teams that competed in it. And they did it convincingly.
Liquid’s Path to Victory
Team Liquid started the NA Qualifier for IEM Dallas 2024 with a match against Nouns Esports, who proved to be much stronger than they looked on paper. The scores were 10 – 13 on Ancient, 13 – 5 on Overpass, and 3 – 13 on Mirage.
Despite the excellent performance of Keith “NAF” Markovic, who finished the match with a personal score of 48 – 35, Nouns managed to win convincingly.
This defeat sent Liquid to the lower bracket, where they were seriously tested. In their first match, against Wildcard, Liquid won on Mirage (13 – 7) and Inferno (13 – 10) but lost on Nuke (5 – 13). Their best player was once again NAF.
This is a bit strange but when we consider everyone else’s score, it’s clear that Liquid’s roster is firing on all cylinders. Even Casper “cadiaN” Moller, who is the IGL, managed to have a positive score and fragged 33 times.
Liquid’s second match of the lower bracket was played against BOSS and it was over much faster than we anticipated. The scores were 13 – 2 on Inferno and 13 – 1 on Anubis. The battle was over before we could figure out what was going on. It almost felt like a warmup. Everyone on Liquid’s side finished with a rating 2.0 of 1.45+.
This success gave Liquid the chance to play against Nouns Esports for the second time. And this time, with all the lessons they learned in the first match, they were victorious. The scores were 13 – 7 on Inferno and 13 – 9 on Mirage. This time, the man who carried Liquid to victory was Russel “Twistzz” Van Dulken.
After returning to Liquid from FaZe Clan, Twistzz needed some time to adjust his playstyle. Now he seems to be doing what we expected him to do, and he is very good at it.
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Header image credit: Team Liquid
