Missed opportunities galore

Can the perennial front-runners stop crumbling under pressure?

About the author

Tomi Kovanen, more commonly known as "lurppis", is one of Finland's most prominent Counter-Strike experts. Kovanen started his career as a player back in 2004, retiring in early-2012. During his active years, Kovanen represented teams such as hoorai, Team ROCCAT, 4Kings and Evil Geniuses.



Following his retirement, Kovanen has continued to be an influential member of the scene, sharing his expertise as a columnist, analyst, commentator and a frequent user of Twitter ( Immortals Tomi Kovanen, more commonly known as "lurppis", is one of Finland's most prominent Counter-Strike experts. Kovanen started his career as a player back in 2004, retiring in early-2012. During his active years, Kovanen represented teams such as hoorai, Team ROCCAT, 4Kings and Evil Geniuses.Following his retirement, Kovanen has continued to be an influential member of the scene, sharing his expertise as a columnist, analyst, commentator and a frequent user of Twitter ( @tomi ). He is now the CS:GO General Manager of

Following their second straight championship – still without losing a single map – at ELEAGUE Premier, I compared them to theteam, and described them as a four-headed monster.Since winning their second tournament,have been ranked either first or second in HLTV.org’s world ranking each week. They have attended a total of seven large international tournaments, and made the final in four of them, going out in the top four two times, and only at EPICENTER – where some of their players were visibly ill – crashed out in the quarter-finals. They also placed second at the ELEAGUE Boston major, the largest and most important tournament so far during this roster’s tenure.What could possibly be wrong with that list of achievements? How high of a standard can you realistically hold even a super team of FaZe’s caliber to?That depends on what you expect of them. I thought this FaZe team could mark this their era, that they could go down as one of the all-time great rosters – up there with2012-2014, fnatic 2014-2016 and the currentcore. But they have not delivered. Instead, they have looked mortal.While FaZe have demonstrated impressive consistency throughout their time together, they have lacked the killer instinct that you often see in the greatest teams. The old NiP and fnatic teams were famous for never giving up and often mounting near-impossible comebacks. The current SK roster is the modern embodiment of always stepping up at the right time and coming through in the clutch. Let them get to the 26th round, and they tend to always find a way to win.Compounding the lack of killer instinct is the head-to-head resume of FaZe’s in-game leaderversus their rivals,’s SK Gaming, boasting a pitiful 0-9 record dating back to the Brazilian juggernaut’sdebut in late 2015 and the Dane’sdays (then playing under the flag of). Likewise, his record on overpass – considered the most tactical map in the active pool – versus the Brazilian sniper stands at 0-10, also dating back to that same series at DreamHack Winter 2015, when Luminosity had changed two players days prior and had yet to put in real practice.As such, it comes as no surprise that SK Gaming easily bested FaZe 3-1 in the ESL Pro League Season 6 Finals last December. But what is killing FaZe’s record is not losses to SK – but instead being unable to convert tournaments where SK were eliminated by others.FaZe, ranked number one in the world, were huge favorites in the IEM Oakland best-of-five grand final versus the 9th in the world ranked NiP, but somehow threw away the series. The loss marked the 6th straight series loss for in-game leader karrigan against the Ninjas, dating back to the late 2015 major at DreamHack Cluj-Napoca, when NiP were in shambles and TSM looked poised to finally advance to a major grand final. Notably, karrigan’s team were favored to win in each of these six series against the former Counter-Strike giants.That FaZe had the game tied on final map cache at 9-9 on the terrorist side – where teams won 64% of their rounds at the event, the most one-sided map of the pool – with full money control (FaZe’s money and equipment value totaled $48K versus NiP’s $26K) at 3-0 only made matters seem worse.The team only secured a bomb plant twice, once in a save round – that they had no chance of winning – thanks to's pistol headshots, and another time in karrigan’s one-on-four win. Otherwise they were stopped out cold by the underdogs, despite playing a map where terrorists traditionally can enter the A bombsite at will and force the defenders to have to retake the site. FaZe showed hesitation, ran out of time and generally gave up on achieving any map control in the middle. Looking at the round tracker below, there was not a single round that even came down to a winnable 1v2 for the super team – NiP’s round wins were all one-sided.In January the super team fought their way to the grand final of ELEAGUE Boston major, even besting their nemesis SK Gaming – playing with former memberas a stand-in – in the group stage, and then overcomingover a three-map series in the quarter-finals andin the semi-finals.Facing, FaZe were once again clear favorites, this time to clinch the major title, as the number one ranked team. Cloud9 entered the event as the 5th ranked team, but having averaged under seven rounds per map against FaZe in their past six offline maps, and they would go on to average under five in their next series at StarSeries i-League Season 4, after the ELEAGUE grand final. Safe to say facing FaZe has been a devastating match-up for’s side, save for that one Sunday in Massachusetts.And yet it was the super team who found themselves unable from championship point onwards at 15-11 to win a terrorist side round – a familiar issue from Oakland – mustering just three bomb plants in nine rounds, running out of time once and averaging just 2.2 kills per round as a team, meaning Cloud9 saw three players survive on average in their round wins.FaZe were actually lucky to win their three one-on-one and one-on-two clutches in retakes on the CT side, each ending with their player at red health, just to prolong the overtime. Cloud9 managed to get a bomb plant in five of their six terrorist rounds, all but the one where Cloud9 lost their bomb carrier near terrorist spawn as NiKo pushed through a smoke past four North Americans. Ironically, the game was all Cloud9 for the final 15 rounds from 15-11 onwards, with FaZe surviving the clutches, until they no longer could. Even coming through in the clutch was not enough for them, because they so rarely got rounds to be close enough.This past weekend in Kiev saw similar issues rear their ugly heads. This time it was not just the terrorist sides though, as NiKo’s team won just one defensive half in the series versus Na`Vi, that saw their opponents start as terrorists each map. To make matters worse, this loss came earlier than the others, knocking FaZe out in the semi-finals, and against a Na`Vi team that FaZe had defeated just days earlier. They pulled through on Na`Vi’s map choice inferno – the one they had lost in the earlier series – to start the match, but then only put up 14 total rounds across their choice overpass, which they had won 16-6 previously, and decider train. And that is despite starting each map on the easier side.For the record, in-between these three devastating losses, FaZe also barely survived the grand final of ECS Season 4 Finals versus 15th ranked mousesports, winning inferno in overtime from an 11-13 deficit to force a decider, and saving two tournament points from 13-15 on the final map mirage to clinch the title in overtime. A win is a win, but it helps put into perspective FaZe’s troubles. This is not a great team elevating their level at the grandest stages, but rather one boasting a losing record in close games, even in matches they are clearly favored in.FaZe’s two dominant tournament runs were the product of massively front-running throughout the events, never facing any danger and thus being able to play their skill-heavy style without any pressure. The only deficit they faced in New York was at 3-4 versusin their group stage opener. In Atlanta for ELEAGUE Premier, they faced harmless first half deficits earlier, and then were down big in the first map of the grand final, before seizing control at 13-13.The skill of NiKo,andhas proven near-untouchable when operating without pressure, but it is not possible to rely on front-running every tournament. To become a great team or to make an era theirs, a squad must master the mental game of close matches and develop a killer instinct. None of the below deficits tested FaZe mentally, which is likely why their early run was emphasized too much when building expectations for them going forward.Despite fielding olofmeister from the legendary 2014-2016 fnatic teams, this FaZe roster tends to crumble under pressure. Statistically rain has done very marginally better in the three losses versus NiP, Cloud9 and Na`Vi than on average during his time in this FaZe roster, but he is the outlier. Put together, the super team of fraggers have scored on average 0.35 fewer kills per round in the losses against NiP, Cloud9 and Na`Vi. Some of that is a function of having lost more rounds, but at the end of the day, kills have a causal relationship with round outcomes, not the other way around. It is worth noting however, that despite NiKo’s clear decline individually in these games, he has still finished with the team’s second-best KPR and K-D differential in the losses.Winning close matches is much harder than front-running, because the latter all-but removes the pressure from Counter-Strike. Without pressure, in a vacuum, FaZe might be in the conversation for greatest team of all-time. They already might be the most skilled team of all-time. But Counter-Strike tournaments are not played in a vacuum, and the very best players must overcome the pressure that is ultimately self-imposed on themselves by the crowd, their fans, and organizations. The best find a way into a zone when all the marbles are in the middle, and then make it work.Disappointingly for Counter-Strike fans, FaZe have yet to reach that final level, and they never might.But that does not mean they cannot perform like a top three team for the rest of the year, win many more titles, or be the best team of 2018. Perhaps the team’s problem all along were the inflated expectations. Perhaps hitting a relative bottom like this could even release some of that pressure. In the end, perhaps no longer being compared to the all-time greats is the best thing that could happen to FaZe.