Team Liquid was one of the finalists at ESL One New York 2017 two weeks ago, losing to Faze three matches to zero in the Grand Finals. However, they played surprisingly well, managing to beat Astralis, former Major champions, and SK Gaming, arguably the #1 ranked team in the world right now.

Liquid didn’t qualify for the PGL Kraków Major back in July of this year. They lost to BIG, a newer CS:GO team based in Germany. This was surprising, as Liquid qualified for both the ESL One New York tournament last year and the previous Major in Atlanta earlier this year. Once Liquid acquired Russell “Twistzz” Van Dulken and Peter “stanislaw” Jarguz in early 2017, replacing former players Pimp and Hiko, they haven’t really accomplished much until recently.

Twistzz is considered one of the best players in the North American scene at the moment. During the past few months, he has shown himself to be a talented N.A. rifler, consistently getting a decent amount of kills during matches, keeping up with or sometimes beating Liquid’s star rifler, Jonathan “EliGE” Jablonowski. His accuracy and skill with all of the rifles are great, pulling off an ace with one in a Virtus.Pro vs. Liquid match at New York, killing the entire VP lineup within a few seconds.

EliGE, said to be N.A.’s “Chosen One” by eSports historian Duncan “Thorin” Shields, didn’t perform as well as Twistzz did in the Grand Finals between them and Faze, but he’s considered one of the greatest, if not the greatest, North American player right now. The number of high-kill matches he has and his amazing spray control rivals some of the best European CS:GO riflers, such as NiKo from Faze and shox from G2. His consistency makes him a very skilled player who normally carries Liquid to better placings in tournaments.

Joshua “jdm64” Marzano, the main AWPer for Liquid, has been with them for just over a year now. While he’s not on the list of “best AWPers of all time”, he certainly is one of the best AWPers in North America. His style of AWPing isn’t the super aggressive style of like a GuardiaN or Snax-type AWPer, but he uses a more passive form of AWPing most of the time. He knows the best angles to hold with the AWP, and will watch them until an enemy is seen. After taking a shot at an enemy or two, he’ll fall back to the next safe angle to watch them from, unlike some aggressive AWPers who may continue to fire at enemies unnecessarily. Because of his passive style, he also uses the double-zoom property of the AWP fairly often, watching a small gap in a while or corner and waiting for Terrorists to peek out. If he needs to be aggressive though, he can certainly do that as well. He doesn’t have the flick speed of GuardiaN, for example, but he’s fairly fast and quite accurate, especially when he uses that double-zoom.

Stanislaw and Nicholas “Nitr0” Cannella played averagely but weren’t the stars of the team. Stanislaw played well as a lurker at times, and Nitr0 got some nice kills, but we’re still waiting for them to join their fellow teammates as really solid, dependable fraggers.

During their performance at ESL One, Team Liquid showed massive potential to become the #1 North American team, and if their skill level keeps rising, to possibly join the ranks of some of the top teams in the world one day, competing with Astralis and G2. If EliGE and Twistzz can continue to produce the stats they currently are and Stan and Nitr0 can continue to improve, there’s no telling how far this team can go.

Sources

Chiu, Stephen. “Liquid enters the ELEAGUE Major after another chaotic year.” Slingshot Media, 17 Jan. 2017, slingshotesports.com/2017/01/17/team-liquid-eleague-major-chaotic-year-tempest-counter-strike/. Accessed 29 Sep. 2017.