The post-Major lull is well and truly over in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and following some big roster swaps and curious results over the past few weeks, a bunch of teams head into this weekend’s ESL One New York with something to prove. Let’s take a look at how this $250,000 tournament is shaping up.
Who’s playing at ESL One New York?
ESL One New York is an eight-team tournament with a quarter million bucks to play for, and the line-up is made up of six invitees and two qualifiers. The invited teams are Astralis, FaZe Clan, Team Liquid, Natus Vincere, SK Gaming and Virtus.pro, while Team EnVyUs and Cloud9 qualified from Europe and North America respectively.
Following Gambit’s prediction-busting victory at the PGL Major in Krakow at the end of July, the roster merry-go-round went into overdrive as simmering intra-team enmity reached boiling point and top teams tried to address perceived problems.
FaZe made some of the most eye-catching changes, adding GuardiaN from Na’Vi and olofmeister from Fnatic, while Na’Vi managed to bring back Zeus from Major winners Gambit to plug their gap, and Cloud9 finally mixed things up by replacing n0thing and shroud with tarik and RUSH from OpTic Gaming.
New York, New York
The groups have already been drawn and SK Gaming will probably be happiest. They are in Group A along with Cloud9, Na’Vi and Team EnVyUs, while Group B consists of FaZe Clan, Astralis, Team Liquid and Virtus.pro.
In Group A, it’s hard to look past SK Gaming for top spot, with Na’Vi making it out in second place. Na’Vi actually won ESL One New York last year and s1mple in particular did some crazy things, so they will probably be hyped for this tournament.
In Group B, FaZe Clan and Astralis seem nailed on to make it out as well. Liquid blow hot and hold – they went quite deep at this venue last year, albeit with p1mp still on the roster – but FaZe and Astralis should have too much firepower for them.
Looking beyond the groups, Astralis feel like they are ready to come up big again with the team hyped and raring to go after Malmo. We wouldn’t be surprised to see an SK Gaming vs Astralis final, with the Danes coming out on top!
GLHF!
Whatever happens, it should be a good show! Come cheer on Astralis with us on ESL’s Twitch channel starting 11am Eastern / 8am Pacific this Friday, September 15. The main event runs Saturday and Sunday.
