FaZe Clan has won the first top-level Counter-Strike 2 LAN tournament at IEM Sydney, beating Complexity 2-1 in the grand final.
Complexity was the surprise of the tournament, coming in as a team expected to be towards the bottom of the standings. After just beating Monte 13-9 in the opening match they lost 2-0 to G2 and looked to be in a difficult position. But they turned things around, only dropping one map in the next four matches to reach the final. They then took an incredibly close map one on Overpass, beating FaZe 13-11 to go 1-0 up in the best-of-three final.
On the other hand, FaZe Clan came in as a top contender and didn’t disappoint. A shock 19-15 overtime loss to GamerLegion in the opening match gave them arguably the hardest route to the final of any team, but they went on an impressive streak, taking out Vitality, NAVI, GamerLegion, ENCE and Mouz before meeting Complexity in the final. Throughout the tournament, they had looked strong on Nuke, and when it showed up as map two in the final they continued that form taking the win 13-10 to send things to a map three.
Ancient was the deciding map and FaZe took the opening pistol thanks to some incredible trigger discipline from Robin “ropz” Kool. FaZe continued to look impressive on the CT side, with even some big mistakes like two missed smokes in a single round going unpunished. By the end of the ninth round, FaZe had taken eight of them and looked unstoppable.
CoL did put two more rounds on the board before the half and then on the CT side looked like a completely different team, taking five rounds in a row to swing momentum in their favor. FaZe Clan made it to map point, but the Complexity comeback continued eventually forcing things to overtime with Håkon “hallzerk” Fjærli putting on a star making performance.
Overtime one saw the teams trade rounds, ending things 15-15 and forcing double overtime. FaZe then finally took multiple rounds in a row putting them on championship point as the teams swapped sides. CoL did take one final round but FaZe closed it out with a 19-16 win. If this is the standard of finals that CS2 can deliver then the future looks very bright for the esports scene.
FaZe walk away with the IEM Sydney trophy and $100,000 in prize money, while Complexity take home just $42,000 for second place.
With the launch of Counter-Strike 2 just a few weeks ago fans have been eagerly awaiting the first top-level LAN tournament to see how the pro players will play on the new game. Now with IEM Sydney in the books, there is a general feeling that although there is still work to do, CS2 will be every bit as good as CS:GO when it comes to esports.
Heading into the tournament there were many concerns about the state of CS2 and the many bugs that keep popping up, but generally, IEM Sydney has been smooth sailing with nothing major popping up. The only real issue was that at the start of the tournament pro players were using certain settings to try and make movement in CS2 more consistent. When Valve found out about this they decided to patch it out mid-tournament. While it is no longer possible for most players to do this, ESL decided that it would play the rest of the tournament without the new update to allow players to continue playing with these settings.
As expected with the launch of CS2 there has been a shake-up with the top teams. Reigning Major champions and the top-ranked team in the world, Team Vitality, went out in last place, while NAVI, the fifth-ranked team in the world went out 9th-12th. Towards the top end of the competition names such as BetBoom and of course, Complexity provided big surprises and established themselves as top contenders in CS2.
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