Competitions:

Date: January 22nd - 29th, 2017

Location: Atlanta, Georgia, USA

Venue: Fox Theatre

Prize pool: $1,000,000

Date: February 15th - 19th, 2017

Location: Las Vegas, Nevada, USA

Venue: MGM Grand

Prize pool: $450,000

Date: March 1st - 5th, 2017

Location: Katowice, Poland

Venue: Spodek Arena

Prize pool: $250,000

Date: April 4th - 9th, 2017

Location: Kiev, Ukraine

Venue: National Palace of Arts "Ukraina"

Prize pool: $300,000

Date: April 20th - 23rd, 2017

Location: Los Angeles, California, USA

Venue: Undisclosed

Prize pool: $150,000

Date: May 3rd - 7th, 2017

Location: Sydney, Australia

Venue: Qudos Bank Arena

Prize pool: $200,000



The Brazilians after winning IEM Sydney 2017. (Photo by HLTV.org)

Date: May 30th - June 4th, 2017

Location: Dallas, Texas, USA

Venue: Verizon Theatre

Prize pool: $750,000

Date: June 17th - 19th, 2017

Location: Jonkoping, Sweden

Venue: Elmia Exhibition and Convention Centre

Prize pool: $100,000

Date: June 23rd - 25th, 2017

Location: London, United Kingdom

Venue: SSE Arena (previously known as Wembley Arena)

Prize pool: $660,000

Date: July 4th - 9th, 2017

Location: Cologne, Germany

Venue: Lanxess Arena

Prize pool: $250,000



SK Gaming at ESL One Cologne 2017. (Photo by HLTV.org)

Date: July 16th - 23rd, 2017

Location: Krakow, Poland

Venue: TAURON Arena Krakow

Prize pool: $1,000,000

Date: August 30th - September 3rd, 2017

Location: Malmo, Sweden

Venue: Malmo Arena

Prize pool: $250,000

Date: September 7th - 10th, 2017

Location: Mykonos, Greece

Venue: Destiny Villa

Prize pool: $240,000

Date: September 15th - 17th, 2017

Location: New York City, New York, USA

Venue: Brooklyn's Barclays Center

Prize pool: $250,000

Date: October 24th - 29th, 2017

Location: St. Petersburg, Russia

Venue: Yubileyny Sports Palace

Prize pool: $490,000



SK Gaming's triumph at EPICENTER St. Petersburg 2017. (Photo by HLTV.org)

Date: November 14th - 19th, 2017

Location: Oakland, California, USA

Venue: Oracle Arena

Prize pool: $300,000

Date: November 24th - 25th, 2017

Location: Copenhagen, Denmark

Venue: Royal Arena

Prize pool: $250,000

Date: December 5th - 10th, 2017

Location: Odense, Denmark

Venue: Sparekassen Fyn Arena

Prize pool: $750,000



Winning the final tournament of 2017. (Photo by HLTV.org)

Statistics:

Tournament standings in 2017:

1st. ESL Pro League Season 6 Finals

1st. BLAST Pro Series Copenhagen 2017

3rd-4th. Intel Extreme Masters Oakland 2017

1st. EPICENTER St. Petersburg 2017

3rd-4th. ESL One New York 2017

3rd. ESG Tour Mykonos 2017

5th-8th. DreamHack Masters Malmo 2017

5th-8th. PGL Major Krakow 2017

1st. ESL One Cologne 2017

1st. Esports Championship Series Season 3

1st. DreamHack Summer 2017

3rd-4th. ESL Pro League Season 5 Finals

1st. Intel Extreme Masters Sydney 2017

1st. cs_summit 2017

9th-11th. StarLadder i-League StarSeries Season 3

11th-12th. Intel Extreme Masters Katowice 2017

2nd. DreamHack Masters Las Vegas 2017

3rd-4th. ELEAGUE Major Atlanta 2017



MVP by HLTV.org medals received in 2017:

5x Marcelo 'coldzera' David

2x Gabriel 'FalleN' Toledo

1x Fernando 'fer' Alvarenga



Overview:

- SK Gaming managed to win eight championship titles out of a total of nine LAN finals.

- Our Counter-Strike: Global Offensive division won more than $1,500,000 in prize winnings in 2017.

- For the majority of 2017, SK Gaming was and remained as the number one team in HLTV.org's rankings.

- The Brazilians won a total of eight MVP by HLTV.org medals.

Conclusion:

Beyond 2017:

Wrapping up:

#RUNSKG

#VAMOSSK

We are almost on the verge of marking the end of the year and embracing 2018, but before we do that, we have created a recap of our Brazilian CS:GO team's adventures during 2017 for all of you!It was a wild year for SK Gaming and thus we have decided to capture all of our competitive moments below with detailed description and statistics of each and every offline tournament that our Brazilians attended.Shall we jump into it?Below we have listed all LAN tournaments that our CS:GO squad attended in 2017: From the beginning to the end of the year in order.Our Brazilian team's first event of 2017 was the tenth official Major tournament organized by Turner Broadcasting System's ELEAGUE in association with Valve Corporation, ELEAGUE Major Atlanta 2017.The Atlanta-based tournament was one of the toughest and most important events in our players' careers due to various factors, but primarily because it was Gabriel 'FalleN' Toledo and company's chance to be the first and only team to date to win three back-to-back Major championship titles and take a lead over Fnatic's dominance in competitive Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.Unfortunately, due to the departure of Counter-Strike veteran player Lincoln 'fnx' Lau , we had to use the Portuguese star and long time k1ck member Ricardo 'fox' Pacheco as a stand-in for this event, as we could not use Joao 'felps' Vasconcellos due to his ties with Immortals which were conflicting with the roster lock restrictions enforced by the game developers.Nonetheless, the team's performance during the ELEAGUE Major was more than respectable, including fox's individual showing, as we managed to finish as 3rd-4th without an entirely dedicated lineup, and were few rounds behind of taking down the Poles of Virtus.pro in the semi-finals, and furthermore potentially winning the entire tournament over the soon-to-be crown as champions Astralis.We failed to realize our goal of winning a third consecutive Major championship title, but regardless continued to perform as the number one team in the rankings for the majority of the year.Our second Counter-Strike: Global Offensive event for the year was the Las Vegas edition of DreamHack Masters.The acquisition of felps was finalized by then and his debut under the SK Gaming banner was nearly a total success. We managed to easily take down both the Chinese team TyLoo and Mike 'shroud' Grzesiek 's Cloud 9 in the group stage.Our Brazilians continued to reign supreme during the playoffs as well as we progressed to the grand final of the competition by taking down Natus Vincere and the Danish team North, in best-of-three series, without losing a single map.We met Virtus.pro in the grand final in Las Vegas, but once more failed to overcome the Polish pride in our rematch, despite Marcelo 'coldzera' David 's monstrous performance during the final match, which saw a K/D difference of +25 and ratio of 1.36, significantly higher than any other player in the match.Following next for our Brazilians was their first event of 2017 that was held on European soil, the eleventh season of Intel Extreme Masters World Championship in Katowice, Poland.Unfortunately, the Polish event wrapped up with one of our most disappointing results in our Counter-Strike history to date. Our team's start in Group B resulted in two defeats to Cloud 9 and Na'Vi, respectively, before our Brazilians to take over Valdemar 'valde' Vangså 's Heroic.Our fourth match was once again versus Filip 'NEO' Kubski 's Virtus.pro, which we narrowly lost 14-16 on Inferno. We managed to take the fifth and final match of Group B against North, but it was not enough for us to proceed forward to the playoffs and resulted in our early elimination from the competition.The third season of StarSeries was one of the year's most stacked tournaments, but also turned out to be one of our division's poorest in terms of performance, as we failed to move further than the group stage.Similar to the aforementioned above IEM Katowice challenge our team ended up with two victories and three losses. The beginning of the tournament was promising as we managed to beat TyLoo and more importantly demolish Virtus.pro 16-2 on Mirage, but failed to prevail over the Frenchmen of G2 Esports, ELEAGUE Major Atlanta champions Astralis and Finn 'karrigan' Andersen 's FaZe Clan.After the two disappointing results outside of North America, our Brazilians came across their first triumph for 2017: cs_summit 2017.Albeit the event having a rather unusual for the Counter-Strike scene structure, the tournament had eight world class teams featured in it and offered a total of $150,000 in prize winnings.Our opening match in Los Angeles was against Adil 'ScreaM' Benrliton 's Team EnVy, which we won without much of a hassle.Our second challenge was versus Cloud 9. The North Americans used former compLexity Gaming and iBUYPOWER superstar Braxton 'swag' Pierce as a stand-in, who ironically was the team's top fragger during the match, but our Brazilians managed to prevail over them 2-1 nonetheless.SK Gaming's final two matches were against Danylo 'Zeus' Teslenko 's Gambit Gaming, which we met twice.Our Brazilian squad outperformed the CIS-based team by a mile, as we managed to win the first best-of-three series with only eleventh rounds lost. The second best-of-five series was a bit harsher for our heroes, but regardless coldzera led his team to a 3-1 victory, and furthermore received his first MVP by HLTV.org medal for 2017.Approximately two weeks after winning our first title of 2017, our Brazilians travelled to the gorgeous Australian city Sydney for yet another Intel Extreme Masters challenge. By then, felps' transition to the team's game structure has been significantly improved, as he was swapped to another role within it.In the group stage we managed to win all three best-of-one matches to proceed forward to the playoffs. These matches were against the Chinese team ViCi Gaming, North and Nicolai 'device' Reedtz 's Astralis.Our semi-finals opponent was the North American team OpTic Gaming, which we also quickly overwhelmed, 16-1 on Train and 16-7 on Overpass, in order to move to the grand final.On the other side of the bracket, the second finalist was Nikola 'NiKo' Kovac 's FaZe Clan. The match was extended to a best-of-five series and was successfully conquered by us 3-1, once again thanks to coldzera's individual performance, which resulted in yet another HLTV.org MVP medal for him!After a few weeks of intensive competition during the online portion of the fifth season of the prestigious ESL Pro League, we reached the LAN finals in May as the number one team in the North American division.The competition was held in the legendary city of Dallas. Dallas is widely known in the Counter-Strike scene as the primary location of the good old Cyberathlete Professional League series.SK Gaming's division was placed in Group A, where we survived the group stage as top three with three wins and two defeats. We managed to take down Cloud 9, our Brazilian friends over at Immortals, as well as Olof 'olofmeister' Kajbjer 's Fnatic, but later on suffered losses against both French teams G2 Esports and Team EnVy.Our Brazilians managed to qualify for the playoffs by winning several tie-breaker matches, and moved on to face Chris 'chrisJ' de Jong 's mousesports in the quarter-finals. Despite beating mouz, our squad failed to defeat G2 Esports, who later on went to win the competition over North, in the semi-finals and finished 3rd-4th.The Summer edition of DreamHack was relatively smaller than the previous events and featured only eight teams, but nonetheless had notable teams playing in it.We started with a 16-9 win over the Danish team Singularity, but immediately afterwards lost to Vito 'kNg' Giuseppe 's Immortals 10-16 on Cache. In the decider match we met mousesports, who we defeated 2-0 to claim a spot in the playoffs.Our Brazilian team faced Counter Logic Gaming in the semi-final match of the Swedish event, which despite Ricky 'Rickeh' Mulholland 's strong play, ended up 2-1 in our favor, and pushed us one step further to the championship title.With our win over CLG, we were able to finally meet none other than our long time rivals of Fnatic, the Swedish powerhouse led by Dennis 'dennis' Edman , in the grand final on their home soil.The first map of the series was Inferno, which we won 16-8 mostly due to our strong T side. The Swedes however came back on Overpass with a devastating 4-16 win over our squad. The third and final map was Mirage, which we managed to take away from the Swedes 16-8, in result winning the DreamHack Summer trophy.Our team's presence within the competitive CS:GO scene continued to grow as we came to win one of the year's most prestigious non-Valve funded event, the third season of ECS, only few days after previously winning DreamHack Summer 2017 over the Swedish team Fnatic.SK Gaming managed to quickly secure a spot for the playoffs as our Brazilians ripped through Richard 'shox' Papillon 's G2 Esports 16-7 on Cache, as well as FaZe Clan 16-8 on Train, in the group stage thanks to our support player Epitácio 'TACO' de Melo Filho 's excellent play.We later knocked out the Danish powerhouse Astralis in the first round of the playoffs and went to take over the championship over FaZe, which we fulfilled this time with the help of Fernando 'fer' Alvarenga , who also achieved his first MVP medal.The next tournament of our squad was one of our most beloved and awaited annual competitions in the world of Counter-Strike: ESL One Cologne 2017.The thrill was overflowing us all at the time as the event is held in the city of Cologne, where SK Gaming as an organization operates today, inside the tremendous Lanxess Arena, and furthermore due to the fact that we walked in as the returning champions and undisputed favorites to retain the legendary championship!Our first step was troublesome as we narrowly lost our initial match to the Turkish team Space Soldiers 14-16 on Cache, but quickly recovered and stood up to take down Virtus.pro and North. Unfortunately, our forth match also turned to an unpleasant defeat to Kenny 'kennyS' Schrub 's G2 Esports, however we managed to beat Fnatic later to claim one of the remaining playoffs spots.Our playoffs run was also not as smooth as expected, as we dropped out a map against the North Americans of OpTic Gaming, but nevertheless won the match. In the semi-finals we met the rising force of Robert 'RobbaN' Dahlstrom 's FaZe Clan, which we outmatched 2-0.Despite the past struggle during the event, our CS:GO squad went for a heroic venture in the grand final to triumph over Cloud 9, 3-0, and retain their world championship title! Our team captain FalleN, a.k.a. "The Brazilian Godfather" was also honored with a MVP medal for his outstanding performance in Cologne.It felt incredible to win ESL One Cologne 2017 earlier the same month alongside all other achievements, but in the end we all know that the Major is what really matters, and then PGL Major Krakow 2017 came by.The $1,000,000 Polish event funded by Valve Corporation was everyone's target during the Summer of 2017 and we felt no different. We also had the opportunity to play with our full roster in contrast to the ELEAGUE Major.Our division had a promising start during the group stage as we finished with a 3-1 record, losing only to the German team BIG on Inferno, who later became infamous for exploiting a jump bug, which however at that time was allowed.But it all went downhill from there on for our Brazilian players. In the quarter-finals we were defeated by Astralis, who had the upper hand during the majority of the time due to device's entry fragging, but the entire team seemed unfocused, resulting in only coldzera and fer barely getting out with positive statistics after the match.SK Gaming retained the "Legends" status, but 5th-8th finish on a Major is far from acceptable for a team of this caliber.It was the beginning of our roster struggle, which resulted in felps leaving the team a few months later in October.Immediately after the Major we had a lengthy summer break, which was for the most part a positive and well deserved factor for most teams including our own.After over a month of lack of appearance on LAN tournaments, we flew to Sweden for the $250,000 DreamHack Masters Malmo 2017 tournament in late August.The competition featured a total of sixteen teams, which included some of the world's biggest names in the CS:GO sphere, albeit things have changed due to the aforementioned summer break.SK Gaming was assigned in Group A together with Cloud 9, North and the Singapore-based team B.O.O.T-d[S], and managed to pull off another playoffs ticket, losing only to the Danish squad.Unfortunately our appearance did not last for long, as our Brazilians lost yet another series to the Frenchmen of G2 Esports in the quarter-finals, who won the competition on the next day.In September our team travelled to Greece for ESG Tour Mykonos 2017, which was the first of the series of these more relaxing and entertaining type of competitions, similar to the cs_summit 2017 challenge in Los Angeles earlier this year, which our Brazilians won.The event was held inside a private villa that accommodated the players in luxury, but despite the surrounding environment it did not drive away the competitive aspect of the event.Our Brazilian division topped Group B without trouble, but lost the first round of the playoffs to the North Americans of Team Liquid. However SK Gaming managed to win the lower bracket final against Virtus.pro in order to finish as third.Less than a week after the end of the Greek event, our CS:GO team went to New York for the next $250,000 challenge: ESL One New York 2017.Our group stage phase was a success as we managed to take down Team EnVy and the revamped Cloud 9, which featured ex-OpTic Gaming duo Tarik 'tarik' Celik and Will 'Rush' Wierzba , to proceed forward to the playoffs.However the struggle within the team structure with felps continued to drag us down and we were unable to reach the grand final, as we lost the semis to Jonathan 'EliGE' Jablonowski and the Team Liquid company in an exhausting Bo3 series.The Brazilian youngster decided to drop out from the active roster after this event and seek out for a new home.EPICENTER Saint Petersburg 2017 was the first step of the new chapter of SK Gaming's Counter-Strike: Global Offensive era.The event was held almost a month after the New York challenge and we brought in ex-Immortals player Ricardo 'boltz' Prass to replace felps for the events to come.The passive playstyle of boltz almost instantaneously boosted our tactical side by a mile and improved our overall strength. We managed to defeat both Virtus.pro and FaZe Clan in a best-of-three series in our group and were the first team to reach the playoffs.Our semi-finals match was against the Danish team Astralis, who knocked us out of the PGL Major during the summer, but this time vengeance was served as our Brazilians triumphed with a solid 2-0 victory.On the other side, Virtus.pro managed to climb back and reach the grand final on their own. There we met them in a lengthy best-of-five series, which we narrowly won 3-2 to be crowned as EPICENTER champions.Our division's next stop after winning EPICENTER was Intel Extreme Masters Oakland inside the Oracle Arena in Oakland, CA.The Brazilians' performance during the first group stage phase of the tournament was not as strong in comparison to the EPICENTER triumph. We had a rough start that resulted in an OT win over Team EnVy in the initial game and a close 16-13 win versus the returning champions Ninjas in Pyjamas during Day 1.During the second day we managed to take down TheMongolz and more importantly Astralis, but lost to Cloud 9 in the final group match. However, we still managed to qualify for the playoffs and defeated the now European branch of OpTic Gaming relatively easily in the quarter-finals.We were not as successful as earlier during our semi-finals match, as we witnessed Ninjas in Pyjamas beating our Brazilian squad and continuing forward to win the event over the FaZe stars soon after.Next on the list for our Brazilian powerhouse was the brand new in the business BLAST Pro Series. Their first edition that was held in November in the Danish capital was relatively small and a bit short, but nonetheless fulfilled its goal as a solid Counter-Strike: Global Offensive competition.The tournament featured only six teams: SK Gaming, Astralis, FaZe, North, G2 Esports and the recent IEM Oakland winners Ninjas in Pyjamas.Our opening match in Denmark was a rather disappointing 3-16 loss against Astralis on Inferno, which despite the map being not necessary one of our strongest, left a worrying sign for our team. Nevertheless the team spirit was refreshed soon after the end of the match and we quickly managed to shutdown G2 Esports, Christopher 'GeT_RiGhT' Alesund 's Ninjas in Pyjamas and the Danes of North.In the grand final, we once more faced the Danish team Astralis, who had to use former Fnatic and GODSENT player dennis as a stand-in for the event as device could not attend due to health issues, and defeated them 2-1, credit to FalleN's dominant play with the big green gun.The last tournament of 2017 for our remarkable Counter-Strike division was none other than the LAN finals of the sixth season of ESL Pro League. The tournament was held from 5th to 10th of December once again in Denmark.SK Gaming came on top of Group B with four wins and a single defeat. Our Brazilian squad prevailed over North, Ninjas in Pyjamas, the North Americans of NRG eSports and Sean 'sgares' Gares ' Misfits, but also narrowly lost to ex-NiP's Adam 'friberg' Friberg 's OpTic Gaming.We once more met Misfits in the upper bracket semi-finals, but closed the match unchallenged as our Brazilians won the entire two-maps series with only seven rounds dropped out. Ladislav 'GuardiaN' Kovács 's FaZe was our last opponent for 2017. The grand final match against the European superteam was set to a best-of-five series.The first map of the series was Inferno, FaZe's choice, and went 13-16 in their favor. But that did not even slowed down our Brazilian squad, as we managed to take the followed Overpass, Mirage and Train, 16-11, 16-9 and 19-16, respectively, to win our last tournament for the year and close it as the number one ranked team!The following statistics show our achievements and final standings of all LAN tournaments during the year.We can safely declare our Counter-Strike: Global Offensive division as indeed the world's best in current time.2017 was a tremendous success for the team as well as the organization as a whole.We were on the verge of winning a third back-to-back Major championship title back in Atlanta in January, but fell short with a couple of rounds behind to Virtus.pro, who had a similar experience in the grand final against the Danish team Astralis.Our run with ex-Immortals' felps in the active roster had up and down moments, but did bring trophies to the organization nonetheless. Playing with boltz felt more natural for all involved and so far has shown impressive results.The future for our Brazilians seems more than promising and we are glad to mention that we are not far behind from achieving the ultimate goal: To be the undisputed world's best Counter-Strike: Global Offensive team in the entire history of the game, surpassing the dominant eras of the Swedish giants Fnatic and Ninjas in Pyjamas.Our 2018 debut and current number one priority will be none other than the $1,000,000 twelfth official Valve-powered Major tournament, ELEAGUE Major Boston 2018, which will take place from 12th to 28th of January.It will undeniably be a blast to compete in and arguably our toughest challenge to date, but will open us the opportunity of achieving the aforementioned above goal.However, our team will once again be against the odds, as we are not allowed to use boltz due to the roster lock rules, and will swap back to felps for the event. Luckily, we have several advantages in contrast of the Atlanta Major earlier this year.It is a fact that felps is, at least on an individual level, stronger player than the Portuguese AWP-er fox and he is also a rifler. FalleN was forced to fit in fox as an AWP-er, which negatively affected his own game, but this will not be a case with felps in the lineup now.Furthermore our team is more familiar with felps' playstyle and have prior experience playing together, making our bootcamp session before the Major significantly more efficient than otherwise.As we have already mentioned, we were few rounds behind from taking down Virtus.pro and perhaps winning the Major as a whole, while using fox. With felps, our chances are higher. Not as much as with boltz, but still enough to win our third consecutive Major championship title!Without a doubt the ELEAGUE Major will be of a huge importance for the team and we can ensure you that we are going to do our best to win it!More information about the ELEAGUE Major Boston 2018 will be released soon.Stay tuned to SK Gaming.To wrap up the article and our 2017 recap, we would like to once again thank our fans, and fans of the game, for the continuous support and we wish you all happy holidays!Do not hesitate to drop by the comment section below or jump in the social medias and share your moments with SK Gaming usingor