Esports World Cup CS2 open qualifier sees multiple major upsets

In the Esports World Cup Qualifier for the last European Counter-Strike 2 (CS2) slot at the event, both HEROIC and Team Falcons lost their Round of 32 matches, making both teams miss the event. To add insult to injury, both losses came at the hands of relatively unknown competitors.

Qualification

The CS2 portion of Esports World Cup will host 15 teams from around the globe. Teams had various ways to qualify for the event.

So far, Team Spirit was invited for their victory at IEM Katowice, Na'Vi for their victory at the PGL Copenhagen Major, and FaZe Clam, Complexity Gaming, FURIA, G2 Esports, Team Vitality, MOUZ, and Virtus.Pro for their top placement in the ESL World Rankings.

Additionally, one qualification spot was opened for the European, North American, South American, Oceanic, Asian, and Middle Eastern regions respectively.

Through open and closed qualifiers for these last slots, teams outside the aforementioned qualification parameters had the ability to still make it to the main event in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia for the event this Summer.

As often in open bracket tournaments, the format for the Open Qualifiers was kept to a Best of One until the last rounds for qualification to the Closed Qualifier. Moreover, the 32 competitors faced each other in a single elimination bracket, inherently making for some volatile results, such as in the case of HEROIC and Team Falcons.

Two favourites miss out

Already in the first round, HEROIC had to take their hat, losing to the Polish team brazylijski luz, a squad that had previously played for Singularity and has not made it to any Tier 1 events in their competitive history. On Ancient, HEROIC got close to averting the upset but ultimately lost with a score of 11-13.

On the other side of the bracket, Team Falcons had to bow out to RUBY with the same scoreline. The upset stings twice as the Saudi Esports organisation will miss the major event on home soil despite a sizeable investment into its roster over the last year.

The team has so far failed to deliver on their potential, with only a top 4 placement at IEM Katowice on their name and otherwise showing middling results for a star-studded European roster.

The rest of the open qualifiers are set to commence today at 6 pm CET / 5 pm BST, with brazylijski luz facing off against NIP and RUBY playing Aurora Gaming.