With IEM Oakland around the corner (November 16-20), I wanted to do a bit of research and give you guys a complete breakdown of the current form of our favorite CSGO teams.

But, first, let’s go over some important introductory notes for our fellow gamers who have just tuned in to watching competitive gaming.

Intel Extreme Masters is an eSports tournament organized by ESL and it exists since 2006. It has featured three major games: CSGO, SC 2 and LoL, but in the latest season we only have competitions in CSGO and LoL.

The event takes place in Oakland’s Oracle Arena — the place where Steph Curry puts on a basketball clinic every now and then.

The total prize money is $400,000 and it’s split in the following way:

$300,000 for CSGO tournament

$100,000 for LoL tournament

$1,000 for every win in the group stage

We will have 12 CSGO teams fighting for that #1 spot, which is worth $125,000.

Out of those 12, 8 have been invited to the event, while 4 will come from the “qualification” tournament — the iBUYPOWER Masters.

Before we jump onto my statistical overview, I just want to give you guys a quick introduction into what it contains.

The tables below contain the most important statistical information you need to get a good grip on every team’s form before the tournament starts.

The main guiding point is my own metric, conveniently called “current form“. I am about as creative as a dead mosquito, so if anyone has a better name for that, please let me know.

Besides that, you will get each team’s performance over the last 2 months and the last 5 matches. The last column is the team’s all time win rate, which will be extremely useful later in the tournament.

Here we go.

Group A

Team Current form Win/Draw/Loss Last 5 Win rate 1. Team Liquid 1.00 16/0/16 3-0-2 58% 2. Na’Vi 0.75 6/3/8 0-3-2 58% 3. G2 Esports 0.87 7/3/8 3-0-2 53% 4. Astralis 0.69 9/0/13 3-0-2 61%

The current form column is basically the ratio of wins and losses in the past two months, and it is a great indicator of how the team is currently performing.

The bigger the ratio, the better the team’s form.

As you can see, the statistical favorites for group A are Team Liquid, which clock in at an even 1.0…The good thing for them is that they’ve played a lot of matches in the past couple of months, a whopping 32.

However, they lost to G2 Esports recently in the NA Arena which is why I believe their matchup will be the most interesting in this group. In the end, Astralis is performing well in the ELEAGUE, so take that in mind as well.

Group B

Team Current form Win/Draw/Loss Last 5 Win rate 1. Heroic 0.66 8/0/12 2-0-3 46% 2. SK Gaming 2.36 26/1/11 4-0-1 54% 3. NiP 1.60 16/3/10 4-0-1 68% 4. Mousesports 2.12 17/0/8 2-0-3 55%

Statistically speaking, this group is the bomb. As you can see, only Heroic here has a negative form ratio in the past 2 months, which means this group will be a blast to watch.

The main favorites in group B are, of course, the mighty SK Gaming, who had an 8 match winning streak before Astralis got the better of them at ELEAGUE.

I would love to predict something completely crazy here but I just don’t think anyone will match SK for the #1 spot in the group. Other two spots are completely open for taking, but it all depends on the placement of the iBUYPOWER teams.

What about the other 4 teams?

It is a bit bold to predict who will come through from the iBUYPOWER, so I will just reflect on a couple of teams that you should pay attention to: TyLoo and Cloud 9.

Cloud9 — has been killing it lately. According to my calculations, they have a current form ratio of 2.57, which is even more than SK. Besides, they won the ESL Pro League Season 4 against SK, which makes them very likely to go through the group stage at IEM Oakland and even into playoffs.

TyLoo — form ratio of 6.00 is, simply put, amazing. TyLoo has played 21 matches (mostly in Asian tournaments) in the last 2 months and scored an incredible 18 wins and 3 losses. Add that to the fact that their all time winning percentage is 78%, and you get a dangerous team that’s ready to make some ground breaking international results.

If you are looking to bet on IEM matches, you can check out our latest ranking of the top 5 websites for betting on CSGO.

Statistical source: GosuGamers.net