‘Chiu on This’ is a short and regular opinion blast

One of the most criticized calls of the MIBR vs Astralis ECS Season 6 finals was round 30 on Inferno. In this round, MIBR looked like they had it in the bag. They had broken Astralis’ economy and were left on a forcebuy. This is a vod, the time the round starts is at 4:02:

The call looks bad if you only look at the isolated round and the totality of information we have on hand. Astralis have taken banana, they have a smoke top mid. There is still about a minute and a half left on the clock, and Astralis only have one smoke nade left. Except for the last bit of information about the utility scenario for Astralis, everything else MIBR should know.

For me though, this particular round was harder for me to judge because I’ve been watching so many Astralis games so I could speculate as to why FalleN called this particular tactic. This round works on three layers. The highest layer is all of the subconscious information and patterns you generally know about Astralis. For Astralis, their general forcebuy rounds consist of five smokes because they like to run down the clock, rotate around, and eventually force the other team to hard duels at close ranges against the CZ.

So there have been a few ways for teams to counter this. For instance, Liquid often just force back Astralis on banana and then do an execute on banana in such a way that even if Astralis have stacked the site, they have confidence in breaking it open, trading through, and winning the round. In the case of MIBR, their idea was to take top mid as a free space as Astralis usually don’t contest this area, but prefer playing more transitional defense.

The second layer is what has happened in the tournament. MIBR played Astralis in the group stages of ECS Season 6 finals and played an entire half against Astralis CT-side. Astralis didn’t fight for the top mid area once and so that particular game confirmed the general patterns of what Astralis was doing.

The third layer was the game in that exact moment. Astralis had used this top mid stack only once in the half on round 24 when MIBR tried to explode through the smoke. Beyond that they had played standard. So with that much information on hand and running the odds, I could understand why MIBR decided to do an explosion into top mid in that round.

Overall I still think it was a bad call given the time they had as they could have waited for the smoke to dissipate and force another smoke from the Astralis side before committing to the explosion play. However, when I think upon this round and some of the others that FalleN has pulled through the years, I think this is fine in a sense. Among all of the great in-game leaders, FalleN has a certain sense of risk to him that gives him an edge against a lot of opponents.

Considering FalleN’s usage of the AWP on T-side. Outside of the typical duels he may look for, he is also someone who puts himself as a solo lurker with no support. This is extremely risky given the nature of the weapon, but he does it so that he can force rotations because no one expects it. Or look at the round before the 30th. In the 29th round he had the team go double AWPS with Stewie2K holding banana and himself going to aps. That completely threw Astralis for a loop as they play logical by the numbers CS. FalleN does that too, but every once in a while he’ll add a gutsy call or risky play in his repertoire because he knows that will throw the opponent off balance, give him the initiative, and let him win. So while I don’t think the 30th round call was the best, I do think that this is something you get with FalleN as an in-game leader. He will make these risky calls and for the most part, they pay off more than they fail.

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