Quick Scope is a series of oftentimes short opinion pieces written by Steven Cropley.

While just months ago we were talking about how amazing it was that North America had two teams in the top 3, coming into ECS things aren’t looking as great.

Team Liquid and Evil Geniuses are certainly talented rosters and some of the best we’ve ever seen out of the region, however, their recent results have been less than stellar.

Evil Geniuses:

Evil Geniuses can’t seem to find their consistency and although they’ve won two events in the last six, they also placed very poorly in three of them. The extra event was the ESL Pro League Season 10 Americas group stage.

Peter “stanislaw” Jarguz’s squad most recently went out 5th-6th at the CS:GO Asia Championships 2019 in Shanghai with losses to MIBR and mousesports, two teams they were expected to beat coming into the event. Just weeks prior they had been in Beijing where they’d made another earlier than expected exit.

While they still sit in second place in the HLTV world rankings, fnatic is quickly approaching and another poor result would almost guarantee a drop. Luckily enough for them, Liquid is far enough behind at this point that they should still hold their ground in the battle of top North American rosters.

It’s time for Evil Geniuses to grab another top placing against the world’s best to not only help them hold on but also to build their own confidence. Tarik “tarik” Celik needs to find his form once more and a poor performance out of Vincent “Brehze” Cayonte will spell disaster.

Currently, EG is the shining example of inconsistency in top-level Counter-Strike.

Team Liquid:

Speaking of Liquid, the team has been relatively absent from the event schedule in recent weeks. The team that dominated in early 2019 has struggled to return to their form after the player break.

It’s been months now though and if Liquid can’t show they are a worldbeater again at ECS or ESL Pro League, their success will become just a distant memory.

Team Liquid seems to be aware of this, however, and chose to skip IEM Beijing and StarSeries i-League Season 8 to lessen the travel load and perhaps rework the team’s tactics for a fresh start.

Having finished 9th-12th at DreamHack Masters Malmö 2019 and 5th at BLAST Pro Series Copenhagen, the team is in desperate need of a top 4 finish to maintain any resemblance to the team that looked unstoppable in June and July.

Jake “stewie2k” Yip is the lowest rated player on the team and while he’s capable of very flashy and impactful plays, he’s oftentimes missing in the kill feed when compared to his teammates. Jonathan “EliGE” Jablonowski, Keith “NAF” Markovic, and Russel “Twistzz” Van Dulken are good enough to win games on their own but it was the combination of this trio firing on all cylinders that led to their dominating run.

I don’t want to throw out the idea of roster moves too early, but if ECS goes poorly it as to enter their mind and if it is followed by a rough showing at ESL Pro League Season 10 Finals next week you can’t ignore the possibility. It will have been six months since the team took their last trophy or even made the final for that matter.

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