It’s only the opening day and the lower bracket is filled with top tier teams. Flying straight in from ESL One New York, several teams are suffering through jet lag in their initial matches and it’s not going so well.

Semifinalists in New York, Team Liquid were dropped by OpTic Gaming 16-9 on Overpass, a generally strong map for the North Americans. While credit can certainly be given to the jet lag, Mathias “MSL” Lauridsen once again showed DreamHack events are where he shines. The OpTic in-game leader finished the map with a server leading +13 kill-to-death ratio alongside 111.4 average damage per round, 28 points higher than the next player.

The ESL One New York champions, Evil Geniuses also took a big hit in their opener against Grayhound. Walking in confident but sluggish, EG went down 16-10 against the Australian side thanks to 100+ ADR games from Simon “sico” Williams and Christopher “dexter” Nong. Even the MVP from New York couldn’t find his footing as Vincent “Brehze” Cayonte finished -3 with 69.3 ADR.

A member of the HLTV press team even took to Twitter noting the sluggishness of certain teams, comparing them to zombies.

I'm not saying certain teams look jetlagged but you could mistake the group stage area for being the set of the Walking Dead. — Milan Švejda (@StrikerHLTVorg) October 1, 2019

While excuses are still excuses, sometimes it seems there’s some validity and the closeness of these two events which are owned by the same parent company seems to be one with a bit more substance.

DreamHack and ESL are both part of Modern Times Group MTG AB and were recently tied together in another way with the reveal of the ESL Pro Tour. This has apparently not stopped the near overlapping of the events that has seen this jet lag problem appear in such force.

Chad “SPUNJ” Burchill predicted such results prior to the event kicking off.

Malmo is going to bring some interesting results. If you are expecting these teams who just flew in from the states to be performing anywhere near 100% tomorrow in the best of one's I've got snake oil I want to sell you. — Chad Burchill (@SPUNJ) September 30, 2019

Lukas “gla1ve” Rossander who struggled in Astralis’ opening map victory over Envy is also suffering after playing in the grand finals of ESL One New York.

gla1ve and jetlag — Lukas Rossander (@gla1ve_csgo) October 1, 2019

Players don’t seem to be enjoying it much either and their collective voice or action may be necessary to prevent such issues from occurring in the future.

Drawing attention to the community and fans, former professional player and CS:GO influencer Mohamad “m0E” Assad questioned whether or not fans were even enjoying the event. Claiming that being”rushed straight into another tourney across the world” allowed two of the top 5 teams in the world to lose their openers to teams ranked 19th and 28th.

Nice to see the best teams in the world collectively lose cuz they got rushed straight into another tourney across the world. Is this fun for ppl?? Do u guys like this? — mOE (@m0E_tv) October 1, 2019

What are you thoughts on this situation? Let us know on social media or in the comments below!

Related article: