Big weekend in CS:GO with the StarSeries & i-League and UML

“No Astralis? No Problem.”

This weekend will mark the beginning of the 7th iteration of the StarSeries & i-League season, with 16 teams competing for the main prize of $250,000 at the Lan Event in Shanghai, China.

The top two seeds globally prior to the event, Astralis and Liquid, are not in attendance, leaving the field wide open for the other competitors to make a run at the top prize. In the weeks leading up to the event, several organizations pulled out of the event due to scheduling conflicts or roster issues.

The Rogue organization announced they are ceasing their CS:GO operations for the time being in a twitlonger statement, and were replaced by ViCi. Team Liquid announced they won’t attend in late January and were replaced by HellRaisers, who then cited roster issues with the departure of Özgür “woxic“ Eker to mousesports and were finally replaced by team Vitality. Mousesports, even though they have recently signed woxic, have pulled out of the event a month earlier citing an incomplete roster and were replaced by Renegades.

With the roster of participating teams finalized days before the event, let us take a look at the eight matches kicking off the Swiss system bracket this Saturday: *complete with predictions in bold

North -vs- NRG

-vs- NRG ENCE -vs- Spirit

-vs- Spirit FaZe -vs- paiN

-vs- paiN TYLOO -vs- RNG

-vs- RNG Fnatic -vs- NiP

MIBR -vs- Panda

-vs- Panda BIG -vs- Vitality

Na`Vi -vs- ViCi Gaming

On top of all the action coming this weekend, Starseries announced an expert-packed talent lineup to guide us through the event.

Meanwhile, on European grounds, the United Masters League will hold its final four event at the M7M Esport Factory in Osnabrück, Germany. Late last year 14 teams played a double round-robin online group stage with teams Valiance, Windigo, Sprout and Uruguay (formerly Red Reserve) advancing to the offline finals this weekend.

The semifinal matchups are: *complete with predictions in bold

Valiance -vs- Uruguay

-vs- Uruguay Windigo -vs- Sprout

The Windigo Gaming squad looks like a clear favourite to win the UML after winning both the WESG World Finals and topping the Dreamhack Masters Dallas Qualifier earlier this week.

Finally, in the most important news of the week, Finn “karrigan” Andersen had a small “request” on Twitter, shortly after making his debut with mousesports. The CS:GO dev’s responded in style, prompting one of this week’s CS:GO biggest highlights.

Try this: sv_allow_astralis_utility 0 — CS:GO (@csgo_dev) March 24, 2019

We wish a sv_allow_astralis_utility 0 to all of you.