DreamHack Open Summer 2019: Let the summer season commence

The central DreamHack hub at Jönköping, Sweden is hosting DreamHack Open during the Summer Festival. Eight teams will battle for the DreamHack Summer trophy and $100,000 in prize money.

The highest global seeds at the event are #16 AVANGAR and #17 CR4ZY (ex-Valiance). The two teams are also not strangers to each other as they managed to meet a few times in the past few months at various events. The rest of the lineup features Edward’s Winstrike, two Danish squads in Optic and Tricked, two Swedish teams: Chaos and Ancients, as well as the newly reformed legendary CS team Aristocracy.

Let’s kick things off with Group A and Aristocracy. The legendary name was reformed by Wiktor “TaZ” Wojtas earlier last month after the contracts with Kinguin/devils.one expired. The new old/name will bring back memories of a generation in CS that dominated Europe as Pentagram and MYM in the early 2000s. It all sprawled from the Aristocracy/SpecSter merge back in 2004. Hopefully the new setup is enough for the ex-devils.one squad to return to former glory.

While nostalgia and former glory are interesting, the real competitor in Group A is AVANGAR. The Kazakhstan squad is having a good season in 2019 attending everything and anything they can lay their hands on, and constantly finishing near the top of the standings. They are looking to repeat their DH Open Rio performance and snatch a second DreamHack trophy. They will face Winstrike in their opening match.

Winstrike has not found much success after the roster swap with Natus Vincere. It has been only two weeks since Ioann “Edward” Sukhariev made the move from NaVi to Winstrike. We can use the changes in ingame leader and acclimation as an excuse for Winstrike’s bad performance in the past few weeks, but if get dominated at DreamHack Summer we can conclude that maybe getting Edward instead of Boombl4 was not the best idea.

We round out Group A, with Tricked. The Danish squad meets Aristocracy in their opener, a repeated matchup they are getting a lot in the past few weeks. Both teams met in two different qualifiers in the last 2 weeks with Tricked coming out on top 2-1.

All in all, Group A features decently matched teams and will be an interesting watch for the DreamHack crowd. AVANGAR should be the team that comes out ahead of the pack.

In Group B, the rebranded Valiance squad CR4ZY squad is looking to carve their path to the finals. The opening match is versus Ancient, a team that is on a roll these days after winning 14 out of their last 16 matches. After winning the local qualifier, the Swedes are hoping they can utilize the home crowds support and take out the highest seed at event in their opening match.

The second opener in Group B features a Nordic duel between Optic and Chaos. Optic is the clear favorite in this match even though they are on a slow roll in June. They ended May with a bang, defeating NiP, FaZe and fnatic in consecutive matches. June came along and they struggled against mousesports and Sprout just two days ago.

Ultimately, I am on the fence about all three Nordic squads in Group B. They have too many ups and downs in performance in short periods of time. With consistency being the issue, CR4ZY should come out ahead in Group B.

The opening matches are as follows: (all times are CEST)

12:00 AVANGAR vs Winstrike

AVANGAR vs Winstrike 13:30 CR4ZY vs Ancient

CR4ZY vs Ancient 15:00 Tricked vs Aristocracy

Tricked vs Aristocracy 16:00 OpTic vs Chaos

Tune in at Twitch.tv/dreamhackcs to follow the action at DreamHack Open Summer.