What to expect from Liquid v. Spirit

Liquid survived the first round of the IEM Katowice 2025 Stage 2 lower bracket after beating MOUZ on February 3rd and now they'll have the scary challenge of defeating Spirit, the current best CS2 team in the world, to stay alive in the $1 million tournament.

Liquid won't beat Spirit without ultimate's help

It's seemingly impossible to imagine Liquid moving past Spirit if their AWPer Roland "ultimate" Tomkowiak has another shy series fragging-wise.

The Polish import cost Liquid some key rounds in their narrow defeat to The MongolZ — much to Chad "SPUNJ" Burchill's ire — in the opening round of IEM Katowice 2025 Stage 2 and delivered a middling performance against MOUZ aside from a great triple kill with the AK-47 on Nuke.

ultimate is currently among the worse-rated players of Stage 2 as he averaged a 0.80 rating in five maps. While Dmitry "sh1ro" Sokolov hasn't carried Spirit so far, this matchup certainly favors the Russian AWPer at the moment.

While Russel "Twistzz" Van Dulken and Guy "NertZ" Iluz hard carried Liquid versus MOUZ, they'll need all the help they can get to counter Spirit Danil "donk" Kryshkovets tomorrow.

Spirit versus Natus Vincere showed donk also need a bit of help

Spirit narrowly lost to NAVI despite donk delivering 71 kills across the three maps. Should anybody else have shown up, it's almost certain that they'd have beaten NAVI as they did at BLAST Bounty Season 1 and multiple times in 2024.

Instead, Boris "magixx" Vorobiev had a stinker of a series against NAVI, and sh1ro and Myroslav "zont1x" Plakhotia barely had a positive K/D. They need someone to win a couple of rounds and take some weight off donk's shoulders.

Previous matchups

Since Twistzz took over the reins after Casper "cadiaN" Møller's departure in 2024, Liquid and Spirit have played each other only two times.

Liquid surprisingly reverse-swept Spirit at the BLAST Premier Fall Final 2024 in September and narrowly lost to them at the Perfect World Shanghai Major quarterfinals in December.

Likely vetoes

Inferno is a 100% Spirit's perma ban so far in 2025 as they vetoed the map in all seven series they played this year, including the best-of-five against Eternal Fire at the BLAST Bounty grand finals.

To make matters worse, Liquid are unbeaten on Inferno this year, having defeated Wildcard and Complexity on it during IEM Katowice 2025 Stage 1 last week. As Train is Liquid's permaban, it's almost certain the vetoes will be something like this:

• Liquid ban Train

• Spirit ban Inferno

• Liquid pick Anubis

• Spirit pick Dust2

• Liquid ban Mirage

• Spirit ban Ancient

• Nuke is left as the decider

Liquid will face Spirit for survival tomorrow at 07:30AM.