Gambit Esports, a professional E-Sports organization in Russia, unexpectedly shot ahead of their competition during Katowice 2021, winning against Virtus Pro, in late February after a switch-up in team members. The tournament is a chance for American and Russian E-Sports teams to show off their rivalry, demonstrating the Russian teams’ dominance in video games and reinforcing their winning streaks.
This year’s winners defeated the second-place team Virtus Pro, 3 wins to 1, in a best of 5 matches. Gambit Esports’ win at the large E-Sports competition solidified a recent upward trend for the team previously known as an underdog. This isn’t a rather shocking win due to Gambit’s win trends, but it still shows that other teams are improving to get to the level of Gambit.
Before late 2020, Gambit Esports hadn’t shown many good results at the tournaments they participated in, with their best placing being at a qualifier which allowed them to play in another qualifier for a tournament that they ended up not qualifying for anyways.
In late 2020, a part of Gambit Esports dubbed the “Gambit Youngsters” were promoted to the main team and the organization saw immediate improvements in results. After this promotion, they started seeing high placements in tournaments of all levels, Katowice being the most recent one.
Katowice is a major annual “Counter-Strike: Global Offensive” E-Sports tournament where many of the best “CS:GO” competitors travel to Poland and participate in a 24-team single-elimination tournament with a prize of $1,000,000. Due to this large prize pool, Katowice attracts the highest-level players and teams, and this year was no exception.
Gambit Esports has many teams for different E-Sports, including “Defense of the Ancients 2”, “CS:GO” and “League of Legends”. Recently, Gambit Esports has been winning many of the “CS:GO” tournaments they go to, including tournaments with massive prize pools and high-level gameplay.
Virtus Pro has a “CS:GO” team that has had a rocky performance since 2016, only recently showing they have the ability to place well at major tournaments, such as placing 1 or 2. Virtus Pro placed highly at Katowice, winning against other fan-favorite “CS:GO” teams such as Astralis and Vitality.
“CS:GO” is a popular team-based first-person shooter game that relies heavily on a single objective with a variable location. Essentially, two teams are put on opposite sides of the map, and one tries to get to the objective on the other side of the map and defend it for 40 seconds after they make it to the objective.
The difficulty of this game comes in the form of the defending team, which the attacking team must get through to get to the objective. The game is much more complex than just this, including many different weapon types, utility items such as grenades and a sound system that can give away your position to the enemy.
Gambit’s win at Katowice is the first S-tier tournament that Gambit won, signifying a solidification of the skill needed to win, as well as the consistency needed to place well over the course of many months.
This is a significant event for “CS:GO” fans around the world, since Gambit has been an underdog in nearly every tournament they’ve participated in since the team’s conception in 2016.
Dylan Shepler can be reached at [email protected]