Photo: By Helena Kristiansson for ESL

Before the IBP Masters event started, it was a hyped up event. It was going to be the first international LAN after the player break and into the new year. There were also many good teams in attendance including: FaZe, Liquid, Astralis, and Fnatic. On top of that, many of the teams had roster changes, which increased the interest in the event. However a cacophony of problems plagued the event throughout it’s two day run. Those problems looked to overshadow everything that happened in the event, until the last match where Liquid beat Astralis in the grand finals. While the event itself has little meaning in the grand scheme of things, it could be an important step for the Liquid squad moving forward.

Why IBP Matters Less

To understand why most teams will write off this event, I’ll post a tweet that Olof “olofmeister” Kajbjer made after FaZe were eliminated from the event.

https://twitter.com/olofmeister/status/1087157807709745154

For my money, that is the correct assessment to have. The conditions at the event were terrible. They had tech issues, audio issues, and massive delays. While all of these problems affect everyone, they don’t do so equally. It’s generally quite random as to how much this can affect a player’s form or condition on the day. The best example I can give is from Starcraft 2 at the WCS Global Finals in 2014. In the quarterfinals of that tournament, Yun “TaeJa” Young Seo played against Lee “INnoVation” Shun Hyung.

Both were considered two of the greatest Terran players to have ever played Starcraft 2, but their careers couldn’t have been any more different. TaeJa grew up in the wild as he never joined a KeSPA team. This meant that he played in tournaments with terrible conditions, jet lag, tech issues, and schedule problems all throughout his career. INnoVation was born and bred in the KeSPA system where everything, including the tournaments were regimented. You knew the stage, the staff, the environment, the amount of time you got to warm up, and the time needed to mentally prepare. In contrast to that, TaeJa had to go in and out of his battle zone at a moment’s notice.

This intangible generally wouldn’t have mattered as Blizzard usually run a good event. This was the case for the majority of the first match as the two of them battled head-to-head in an awe-inspiring battle that showed the heights of their skill. Then a tech issue happened that caused a 2 hour break. When the game resumed, INnoVation was a shell of himself. The nerves, pressure, and problems got to him and he never played at the same level. On the other hand, TaeJa continued to play at his peak level of performance and smashed INnoVation out of the series.

When we look at esports events with massive difficulties like the IBP Masters then, we have to take it with the contextual information we know about it. It’s not that these results don’t matter or that they don’t count. All of the results count, but the problem is that these issues have proven to cause upsets in team games. The best example of this was WESG finals in 2017. That was another tournament that had massive issues and in that tournament, we had SK fall in the group stages and Cloud9 lose to Team One.

When issues like that arise then, there is no general consensus on how teams or players take the results. For instance, at IBP Masters, I’d be shocked if FaZe took the two best-of-one losses to heart against Ghost. On the flip side of that equation, I imagine Ghost will take that exact same result and use that as a boost of confidence in their own ability and could even play better because of it. Thus we get to the Astralis and Liquid Finals.

Why IBP Masters Should Matter for Liquid

When we look at the Liquid lineup of last year, the one that had: Nicholas “nitr0” Cannella, Jonathan “EliGE” Jablonowski, Russel “Twistzz” Van Dulken, Keith “NAF” Markovic, and Epitacio “TACO” de Melo, there is a lot to say about them. In CS:GO history they are easily the best NA lineup ever assembled by a country mile. In terms of raw firepower and potential, they easily rank as one of the best lineups assembled in history. Finally, they had a terrible matchup against Astralis as they have lost every best-of-three+ series against Astralis and have also lost seven finals in 2018 (six to Astralis, and one to Mouz).

So when we look back at that Liquid team, the two most common narratives that surround it is their inherent weakness against Astralis and their problems in big final matches (The killer for me was the loss to Mouz on Dust2 where they were up 13-4 at ESL NY). We never saw what could have happened with that Liquid lineup as TACO decided to leave to rejoin MIBR. After he left, the team recruited Jacky “Stewie2K” Yip to the roster. So coming into IBP Masters, the question for them was how well did Stewie2K fit into the team and how could the new Liquid fare against Astralis?

Given the circumstances of the event, it’s hard to know. If you look purely at the in-game tactical structure and individual play, everything seemed fine for Liquid. The problem was that outside of game context means that it’s hard to gauge the amount of focus and form the other teams were at. After all, not only did IBP Masters have a ton of issues, it was also the first event after the player break. In CS:GO, we’ve seen multiple times that teams are less focused and sharp right after the player break ends. On top of that, Liquid was under a honeymoon effect as they had just gotten a new player into their team and no one knew how they’d play as Stewie2k and TACO are vastly different players despite playing some similar spots.

Having said all of that though, there victory here does matter for Liquid for two reasons. First, in terms of the tactical and stylistic side of the equation, Liquid were playing for more aggressively and individually compared to the more standard structural style that they had when they played with TACO. While Liquid were destroyed on Inferno, they were able to use that style to great effect on both Dust2 and Overpass on the T-side of the map. On top of that, they constantly flipped the AWP around between four of their players (the only player who doesn’t use it on this team is EliGE). We’ve seen this style of play have some success against Astralis in the past, most notably with how FaZe beat Astralis in 2018. This is something that Liquid can take forward into their future engagements as a style that has at least worked at this one tournament.

The bigger victory for Liquid though is their confidence. There is a time in most competitor’s career where they hit a specific ceiling that cannot be broken. Once they run into that ceiling enough times, they start to develop a level of nerves around it. This can manifest in different ways, whether that’s going silent, going passive, going too aggressive, or communicating too much. The best anecdote that describes this phenomena was from Duncan “Thorin” Shield’s reflections with Gabriel “FalleN” Toledo.

It’s forgotten now, but back in late 2015 and early 2016, the Brazilian players had hit a similar ceiling to Liquid. They got to the finals of three big international events: Faceit Stage 3 Finals, DreamHack Leipzig, and IEM Katowice. In all three, they lost in the finals. FalleN recalls in the interview that, “We were getting nervous in those games. People would be over communicating, people would be calling over me, even myself.”

Those losses and that experience though helped the Brazilians push through that barrier and get over the hump. They were able to pinpoint the mistakes and because they hadn’t built the amount of trauma that Liquid had, they were able to win the Major. For the Brazilians, the Major was a big stepping stone as it changed their mindsets from ‘Believing we can win’ to ‘Knowing we can’. As FalleN says in the interview,

“You need the first wins to put it into your mind that you are capable of it[winning]”

This not only happened with the LG/SK team, it also happened back in the early ages of CS:GO history between NiP and VeryGames. For most of early CS:GO, NiP consistently smashed VeryGames whether it was online or on LAN. However that started to shift in 2013. While a large part of it was likely due to VeryGames recruiting Richard “shox” Papillon, another part of it came from the confidence of winning a seemingly meaningless online game at the MSI Beat it! 2013 Qualifiers where VeryGames beat NiP 2-0. That was likely a boost of confidence they needed to start playing their best against NiP and from that point forward, the VeryGames-NiP rivalry had VeryGames take the lead in the head-to-head.

While IBP Masters 2019 was a trainwreck of a tournament whose results shouldn’t be taken too seriously. There are too many pieces of context that likely won’t be repeated going forward. For instance, most other tournament organizers are far more competent than this. Group stages have more best-of-threes rather than pure best-of-ones. Most tournaments also don’t come right after a player break. But even with all of that context put together, the Liquid victory against Astralis does have value and meaning for Liquid. They’ve proven to themselves that they can beat Astralis in a finals. While it wasn’t the biggest finals nor a high pressure finals, this was a big step in the right direction for the squad moving forward and could prove to be the difference should the two teams clash at the IEM Katowice Major.

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