Starladder Major Main Qualifier Pick'em predictions

Zep
Aug 19, 2019
2 min read

This major we will be invited to Berlin, hosted by Starladder, to enjoy one of the biggest Counter-Strike tournaments of the year. We start the major off on 23rd of August for the main qualifiers to see which teams will make it to the main stage. We have 16 teams attending.

As is tradition for many people during majors, we will post our +EV pick'em predictions. In order to upgrade the pick'em for the group stage, you need to make 5 correct predictions. To maximize our chances, we should pick the safest 7 teams to advance and pick a dark-horse as our 3-0 pick. Here is what we decided on, I will explain our reasoning below.

Vitality, NRG and Mouz are no-brainers. They are on another tier of CS compared to the other teams attending. Vitality and NRG also have very forgiving first round match ups (Syman and Dreameaters), which should be a walk in the park.

CR4ZY and Forze tend to go under the radar because they rarely attend LAN events, but they both show a lot of promise. They are solid Tier 2 teams and I could see them qualifying over the competition.

To round out our safe picks, North and G2 are solid squads and have improved with time.

As explained earlier, we chose a dark-horse for our 3-0 selection as we only need 5 right. For that reason we have picked Furia. They have a solid bunch of players, but are sometimes hit or miss. We've seen them make huge tournament runs, with wins over some of the best (e.g vs. Astralis), but they also dip in performance and show lackluster runs at other times. We're not sure they will qualify, but if they do, they are going to put up one hell of a show.

Finally, we chose Intz not to win a game. In their recent online games, they have shown weakness and they didn't impress at the major qualifiers either. We had to choose between Dreameaters and Intz but since kNg is leaving, along with a tough first round match-up in North, we decided on Intz.

To advance: