2019 BLAST Pro Series lands in Miami

“The BLAST roadshow has reached Miami for RFRSH’s second tournament in this 2019 BLAST Pro Series season.“

Three weeks after BLAST São Paolo, the daddy organization behind teams Astralis and Origen is landing its first tournament on North American soil. Six teams will battle once again for $250,000 in prize money at the Watsco Center in the University of Miami, Florida.

Read more about this tournaments in our BLAST Pro Series wiki page.

The North American welcome party comes in the shape of teams Liquid and Cloud9 as the home crowd favorites. We have not seen Liquid since BLAST Sao Paolo final against Astralis, and we are not too worried about them bringing their A-game to the event. The C9 squad on the other hand has fallen off recently in terms of performance. The recent acquisition of the Dane René “cajunb” Borg might provide the “oomph” they need to turn things around and please the hungry home crowd.

Please join us in giving a warm welcome to the newest addition to the #C9CSGO squad, René "@cajunbCS" Borg! Read: https://t.co/6VFVEgXNfQ pic.twitter.com/oks9e9znXU — Cloud9 (@Cloud9) April 2, 2019

Natus Vincere, the winner of StarSeries i-League Season 7, is here as well. Coming in hot after their dominating performance in Shanghai, they seek a repeat performance to cement themselves at the top of CS:GO’s power rankings in 2019.

The final attendee list is rounded off with teams mibr and FaZe, both of whom are having hard times performing against the world’s top teams. For mibr, it has been downhill ever since the IEM Katowice semi-finals against Astralis. They managed to lose 9 out of 10 official matches they played recently, and a few more consecutive defeats might spell big trouble for the Brazilians. FaZe is not fairing any better in terms of performance, but they have at least beaten both Cloud9 and mibr recently, so there’s an upside for them at this event.

With all the attendees listed, let us take a look at the general feel of the tourney and lay down some predictions.

The tournament features a best-of-one round robin group stage split into five rounds of matchups. As tradition dictates, the first two rounds will be a behind closed doors before the doors BLAST open for the audience the following day. After five rounds of robin are complete, the top two teams advance to the grand finale. The 3rd team has a chance to play the BLAST Stand-off aim duel against one of the remaining teams for a shot at an additional $20,000 added to their prize pool.

On the caster side of news, BLAST Pro Series Miami will also feature Team Envy’s Noah “Nifty” Francis to spice things up as an analyst among the standard caster lineup.

Finally, for those betting aficionados, the first six matches coming in on Friday are as follows: (predicted winner in bold)

MIBR vs Natus Vincere

Astralis vs Cloud9

vs Cloud9 Liquid vs FaZe

vs FaZe Cloud9 vs Liquid

FaZe vs MIBR

Astralis vs Natus Vincere

Until the action kicks off, get all hyped up with highlights from the most recent BLAST Pro Series event in Sao Paolo.

The world top teams clash Friday 12th of April at 23:00 CEST at Twitch.tv/blastproseries