The Intel Grand Slam winners punched their ticket to Rio the hardest way possible, going down to the last chance qualifier after a 2-0 start in the Swiss stage, ultimately having to face their grand final opponents from ESL Pro League season 17 in the decider series.
Despite going down 14-5 on Mirage after a poor T-side start, karrigan managed to rally his troops to complete the comeback on the first map of the series, pushing it to overtime and then winning four rounds in a row off the back of an incredible individual performance by broky to take significant momentum into the next map of the series.
Related: All CS:GO teams qualified for BLAST Paris Major
Inferno turned out to be a much more straightforward affair, with FaZe securing an 11-4 halftime lead of their own on the less-favored T side, then converting the pistol round to set themselves up for an eventual 16-9 win. This time, it was rain and Twistzz who went nuclear, with ropz also putting up strong numbers to push the international team past the finish line.
The result wasn’t without controversy. BLAST’s handling of the RMR tournaments has received many criticisms, with competitive integrity issues like stage violations and incorrectly applied rulesets cropping up in the American and Asian competitions. In the showpiece European event, the Buchholz tiebreakers for the last chance qualifier were calculated after just four of the five Swiss rounds played, an added insult to injury considering how the teams from RMR A already had extra time to rest and prepare. Ultimately, Cloud9 had to fight their way through four consecutive best-of-three series in two days for a chance to qualify, facing a FaZe team with significantly more time to rest.
It’s no surprise that Konstantin “groove” Pikiner, the coach of Cloud9, called it all a little unjust in the post-match interview. “To be honest, I don’t think it was so fair in my opinion because of the group, [the] draw wasn’t balanced,” he said, explaining that RMR A had six teams from HLTV’s top 30, while their group had 13, yet they had three Legend slots to four.
There’s no time to reminisce about what could have been, though: IEM Rio 2023 is just around the corner, where both teams are going to feature in the sixteen-team battle in front of Brazil’s raucous crowds, starting April 17. From then on, it’s just a hop and a skip until the final CS:GO Major, starting May 8 in Paris.
