NA CS at the Majors: ESL One Cologne 2014

With the BLAST.tv Paris Major just over two weeks away, Dust2.us is building up to the last ever CS:GO Major Championship by taking a trip down memory lane at all the history of North American Counter-Strike in the top-tier competition. We last covered EMS One Katowice 2014 and are now back with the first Major in Cologne – ESL One Cologne 2014.

ESL One Cologne 2014 was announced by Valve on June 19th, 2014 as the third Major in CS:GO's history. One of the largest changes to come with this Major was the implementation of direct qualifiers for most regions, including North America. This simplification of the path to CS:GO's world championship was a welcome change as teams would no longer have to apply and prove their ability to make it to Gamescom like iBUYPOWER and Vox Eminor had to earlier in the year.

Another massive change brought about at ESL One Cologne 2014 was Valve's decision to increase the activity duty map pool from just five maps to seven maps; something that is now the competitive standard. This map pool refresh saw the classic but heavily one-sided map Train exit the pool while Cache, Cobblestone, and Overpass were added to the pool. While this decision can be looked back fondly on today, at the time adding Cobblestone and especially Overpass was controversial as teams had little practice on the two maps and they weren't as polished as the classic maps already in the pool.

The final change, this time to the viewer experience, came with the introduction of the Pick’Em Challenge. The goal of the Pick'Em challenge is to correctly pick which teams would advance through each stage of the Major, with the goal being to claim the gold trophy at the end of the Major for the coveted bragging rights.

ESL One Cologne 2014 hosted two North American squads: Cloud9 and iBUYPOWER. These two teams were mainstays of the Major circuit by this point – albeit with massive changes. In the time between Katowice and Cologne, Spencer "Hiko" Martin and co. had left compLexity to link up with Jack Etienne's Cloud9, taking the top eight invite spot with them. Additionally, since Katowice, coL/Cloud9 had replaced Braxton "swag" Pierce with Todd "anger" Williams before deciding on Canadian Michael "Shroud" Grzesiek.

At the time Shroud was viewed as an up-and-comer and was an interesting choice versus the team's other serious target, Derek "DboorN" Boorn, former coL and Evil Geniuses CS 1.6 player. While it's outside the scope of this article, DboorN is more infamously remembered by CS:GO fans as one the perpetrators of the iBUYPOWER matchfixing scandal... so bullet dodged there by Cloud9.

Speaking of iBUYPOWER, their team was also radically changed ahead of Cologne 2014. iBUYPOWER had replaced anger and Eric "adreN" Hoag with experienced name Joshua "steel" Nissan and former coL young gun swag. This team played the first ever North American qualifier for a Major, clinching their spot quite easily after besting Damian "daps" Steele and Keith "NAF" Markovic's Lunatik in the finals.

The expectations for Cloud9 were especially high heading into Cologne as the team had made Major playoffs twice before while putting up strong showings against EU teams. Additionally, Hiko engaged in a bit of saber rattling in an interview with Tomi "Lurppis" Kovanen, about new addition Shroud:

If there are any doubts of Shroud on LAN, allow me to assure you all now that you are in for a treat at ESL Cologne. May the Viking gods have mercy on the European teams if we are able to get a bootcamp in with Shroud.

Heading into the tournament itself, Cloud9's GSL group featured the likes of Henrik "FeTiSh" Christensen's Dignitas, Titan, and Vox Eminor. Cloud9 started their run off with a fantastic 22-19 overtime win against Titan on Dust2 before narrowly overcoming Dignitas in a 30-round scrap on Mirage to clinch their spot in playoffs. Hiko was the big man on campus for Cloud9 as he posted a 1.30 and 1.19 rating in these matches.

Over in iBUYPOWER's group, the team started off on a rough footing as they were were mauled in a 16-7 loss to Fnatic on Cobblestone despite a massive performance from swag. After licking their wounds, iBUYPOWER looked much better in their match against Andrey "B1ad3" Gorodenskiy's dAT as they kicked the Russian-Ukrainian squad out with a dominant 16-6 match on Cobblestone. Unfortunately, in the decider iBUYPOWER missed out on playoffs once again in a legendarily one-sided match as Virtus.pro thrashed the team 16-2 on Cache, with Janusz "Snax" Pogorzelski ending the match with a +17 kill differential.

Moving into playoffs, in a repeat of Katowice, Cloud9 squared off against NiP once again in the quarterfinals. The BO3 started with Cloud9 shocking NiP with a dominant 16-8 win on Nuke thanks to a strong T-side. The second map, Dust2, ultimately went the way of the Swedes in the 30th round thanks to Richard "Xizt" Landström leading the charge in the fragging department.

In the third-and-final map, Cobblestone, the match continued to be extremely back and forth up until the 30th round when Kory "SEMPHIS" Friesen was left in a 1v5 to force overtime. NiP would ultimately seal the deal, but Cloud9 pushing the eventual champions to their very limit was an amazing moment in NA CS:GO history.

As can be expected, swag was once again NA's MVP, ending the event with a 1.43 rating over three maps. Despite this dominant performance his team once again let him down by failing to make playoffs, a trend that would unfortunately continue to haunt the young star.

Tomorrow, we will be back with DreamHack Winter 2014.