NA CS at the Majors: PGL Major Kraków 2017

As we near closer and closer to the BLAST.tv Paris Major, the final CS:GO Major Championship, Dust2.us is walking down memory lane to relive North America’s Counter-Strike history at the Majors. Following the disaster at Atlanta, wherein OpTic and Liquid both failed to make Legends, the first Polish Major since 2015 saw NA have to struggle to even get a team onto the biggest stage in Counter-Strike.

Heading into Kraków, the largest change to the game itself came in the form of Valve removing Dust2 from play and adding in the new-and-improved Inferno. Additionally, PGL introduced a slightly revamped veto system which gave the higher-seeded team an advantage in BO1 matches by allowing them to pick the map.

Other than those two changes, the Major format was well entrenched by this point heading into the Minors, with Immortals and Cloud9 advancing to Kraków's offline qualifier at the expense of a huge cast of NA hopefuls due to the Minors being expanded from four teams to eight teams.

One of the most notable occurrences of the Minor was the trouble Misfits found themselves in heading into the event. The team's IGL, Sean "⁠seang@res⁠" Gares was replaced by Skyler "Relyks" Weaver due to the former player's wedding. While this situation was unfortunate, what happened next was the real insane part. Right before the Minor, Misfit's head coach, Luis "peacemaker" Tadeu, made the extremely questionable decision to swap out Shahzeeb "ShahZaM" Khan for Caio "zqk" Fonseca on Misfits.

This decision coupled with the team having no IGL led to them quickly bombing out of the qualifier following one-sided losses to CLG and paiN. To put a pin in it, the aftermath of this would see peacemaker dismissed 17 days later while ShahZaM was returned to the lineup.

Outside of that matter, the Americas Minor went off largely as expected, with Immortals and Cloud9 returning to the Offline Qualifier. Notably, however this came at the expense of CLG, who as a result would miss both 2017 Majors.

Heading into the offline qualifier for Kraków, which took place in PGL's home turf of Bucharest, Romania, NA struggled to find their footing from the get go, with OpTic falling 0-3 with losses to PENTA, Vega Squadron, and Renegades.

The though blows would continue for NA as Liquid would also miss out on Kraków by an incredibly narrow margin following a traumatizing 23-25 loss to FlipSid3 Tactics on Mirage. This would see Liquid miss their first Major since qualifying to Cluj-Napoca in 2015 and also deny young Canadian Russel "Twistzz" Van Dulken a chance to play his first Major.

Fortunately, there was some light at the end of the tunnel for NA fans as Cloud9 made a relatively squeaky clean run through the Offline Qualifier. Their only loss was against the French Supreteam G2, with Jordan "n0thing" Gilbert and co. making it to Poland with a 3-1 record.

Cloud9

• Jordan "n0thing" Gilbert

• Michael "shroud" Grzesiek

• Tyler "Skadoodle" Latham

• Jacky "Stewie2k" Yip

• Timothy "autimatic" Ta

• Soham "valens" Chowdhury (Coach)

Heading into the Major itself, with all eyes on Cloud9, the boys started their run off on good footing as they took down Mathias "MSL" Lauridsen's North in a confident 16-12 win on Mirage. After this win, Cloud9 would face off against German squad BIG. Against Fatih "gob b" Dayik's troops, Cloud9 would face a 16-11 loss on Inferno. However, this loss came with controversy as BIG utilized an exploit known as the "Crouch Jump Bug" which allowed them to see over short walls like on Inferno Banana without being seen.

This bug led to much consternation among almost every other team at the event even after admins agreed to allow the bug. This anger would lead to representatives of every team, while initially shunning BIG, agreeing to not use the bug. This crisis would eventually result in BIG being consulted/shamed behind closed doors into also agree to not use the "Crouch Jump Bug" anymore. This moment, would result in the famous team meeting meme image for you Reddit historians out there.

With that crisis out of the way, Cloud9 went into their third round match against G2, unfortunately losing to the French Superteam once again, albeit in a 19-16 nail biter on Cobblestone. Continuing into round four, Cloud9 came back all guns blazing as they eliminated mousesports with a tidy 16-11 win on Train.

Unfortunately for Cloud9 and the NA scene in general, Cloud9 would trip at the last hurdle against Virtus.pro as the Atlanta Major runners-up were too tough a challenge to overcome, with Cloud9 dropping train 16-10 and exiting the Major just shy of playoffs.

As a result of this loss, NA would again fail to clinch a Major Legends spot and would need to make their way through the gauntlet in the next Major.

Next up Ryan Friend will be discussing the ELEAGUE Boston Major where if memory serves something important happened... I'm sure he'll remind you of it.