IEM Katowice storylines in numbers

29 matches, more than one million viewers, and a 122 round final — the first arena event of the season has left us with plenty to unpack.

The dust has settled in Katowice. The stage has been dismantled and the confetti cleared up, while players are already turning their attention to ESL Pro League. Yet, it would be remiss to move on from what transpired at Spodek too quickly.

An enthralling final, plenty of upsets, and stellar debuts made Katowice an event to remember. It took the viewership record for non-Major matches for good reason and gave us our first bit of reliable data for the season ahead.

Reliable, though, does not mean straightforward. Here are some of the best and most surprising statistics and storylines to come out of IEM Katowice 2022.

jks goes out of his comfort zone

Initially standing in for FaZe in place of fellow lurker Robin "⁠ropz⁠" Kool, Justin "⁠jks⁠" Savage performed admirably in the group stage despite having just "five or six days" of practice. When ropz returned, all parties were happy — jks had reminded us of his quality and FaZe got their starting five back in time for the business end of the event. But, just two series later, jks was called upon once more after Håvard "⁠rain⁠" Nygaard kept returning positive COVID tests, which made the Norwegian unable to play in the Spodek Arena itself after playing a part of the group stage from isolation.

Rather than his preferred lurking spots, jks would shuffle rain's entry fragging duties with Russel "⁠Twistzz⁠" Van Dulken, meaning he was tasked with a level of aggression he had never shown a real affinity with. On HLTV Confirmed, his former in-game leader Chad "⁠SPUNJ⁠" Burchill said as much: "I used to have to tell him […] to get him to die first. I would get so frustrated watching him after the rest of us were dead for a minute." A disappointing spell in Complexity's entry pack did little to dispel this narrative.

But, something was in the water at Katowice. jks' 1.22 opening kill rating in the playoffs was the 4th highest, and a 57.1% success rate with 25.7% attempts is impressive; success rates that high are normally reserved for AWPers (and Nikola "⁠NiKo⁠" Kovač). He did everything Finn "⁠karrigan⁠" Andersen could have asked for, putting up good ratings whilst creating space for Helvijs "⁠broky⁠" Saukants and ropz to close rounds. As shop window adverts go, this was a pretty good one for the Australian.

FaZe's firepower

Speaking of that particular trident, having so many clutch players has its perks. FaZe were the best team at the event in man-down scenarios, winning 37% of their 4v5s. In the eye test, too, FaZe were formidable in rounds they should not have been, exemplified by jks and ropz' 2v5 on armour-less pistols on Mirage against G2. Normally, you would point to luck — more often than not, 5v3s are lost rather than 3v5s won —, but FaZe won enough of these scenarios for praise to be warranted.

It says a lot not only about their clutch factor, but the raw firepower available to karrigan. FaZe had the highest team rating at the event (1.12) and the most multi-kills too, at 0.86 per round. Of course, these stats share the flaw of being weighted towards teams that win a lot, with multi-frags against full ecos counting as much as ones in key gun rounds.

Yet, it is to FaZe's credit that they created opportunities to inflate their stats in this way; their 51.4% win-rate on T-side was better than anyone's at Katowice. Considering karrigan was juggling a stand-in that does not know his stratbook in-depth, FaZe's T-sides become even more impressive; FaZe were worthy winners at Katowice.

NiKo loses grip of the MVP

After storming to a 1.50 rating in the group stage, NiKo slumped in the playoffs, recording a 1.01 rating over the three series. That his high-risk high-reward playstyle puts him on the level of Oleksandr "⁠s1mple⁠" Kostyliev and Mathieu "⁠ZywOo⁠" Herbaut with an inferior weapon so often should not go underappreciated, but NiKo's loss of confidence on stage left G2 without their sharpest weapon when they needed him most. 'Regression to the mean' is an overused maxim, but in this case it might be true: it would be unreasonable to expect 1.40+ ratings from NiKo every event.

What is reasonable, though, is to expect him to perform better than he did in Katowice's playoffs. Given Ilya "⁠m0NESY⁠" Osipov and Nemanja "⁠huNter-⁠" Kovač's performances on stage, NiKo is out of excuses. He finally has the pieces to start an era and ensure this IEM Katowice defeat will be a short footnote to an otherwise glorious tale.

FaZe's MVP candidate, meanwhile, had no such problems in Spodek. Winning ten clutches, broky continued his habit of rising to another level when the pressure was on. This was most apparent on Dust2 in the final — at 13-13, in a crucial gun round, broky sniped down four of G2. At 15-14, he nearly repeated the feat, halting G2's short push with three crucial AWP frags and a tag on a fourth.

His passive style has its critics — he attempted just 14.5% of FaZe's opening kills in Katowice, the lowest for any AWPer not named Dzhami "⁠Jame⁠" Ali —, but the advantages of the modern AWPing meta were on full display here. His K/D at Katowice was 1.53, his opening kill ratio 2.05, and his overall deaths per round came in at 0.55, a stupendously low statistic. Simply surviving puts broky in a position to deliver death blows via his signature multi-kills and never leaves him without the Big Green when he needs it; if broky is alive, and he normally is, you can never count FaZe out of a round.

Vitality need more time

While FaZe and G2's new era began with a final, it was not quite as easy for the third European superteam of Vitality. A 9th-12th placed finish at Katowice, after topping their BLAST Premier Spring Group, might seem like a disappointment, but there were still signs of promise from their LAN debut. One such omen was the performance of Peter "⁠dupreeh⁠" Rasmussen, the 28-year-old looking even better than he had at BLAST with a 1.19 rating in Poland.

Another glimpse of what might follow was Vitality posting the most utility damage per round of anyone at the event, dishing out 30.8 damage each round with grenades. In 2021, Vitality's utility ADR of 18.0 was the worst of any top team, using the top 20 filter. This shows the instant impact of adding three members of Astralis, the team made famous for its revolutionary utility usage. Emil "⁠Magisk⁠" Reif alone put up 8.4 grenade damage per round, but it was Dan "⁠apEX⁠" Madesclaire who led the way with 10.8, suggesting ideas have been shared already.

Solace for Vitality should also come in the fact that ZywOo's performance at IEM Katowice was surely an anomaly. Counter-Strike's Chosen One had a negative rating for three crucial maps in a row, including his now infamous 3-18 K/D against Gambit. It seems far more likely that, rather than this being a sign of ZywOo's decline, the Frenchman will return to the level he has so consistently displayed since bursting onto the scene in 2019.

Such a great culture shift, with all five players on their first English-speaking roster, was bound to take time. But, on paper, the pieces are there; we should not allow a freakish underperformance from ZywOo to make us underestimate apEX's squad.

YEKINDAR's wild series

All the way back in the first match of the event proper, Mareks "⁠YEKINDAR⁠" Gaļinskis's signature 'space creation' did not lead to much statistical reward against Copenhagen Flames — a 0.79 rating is pretty measly by his standards. But, along with providing seven first kills and the all-important space for the more passive parts of Virtus.pro to flourish, YEKINDAR still found a way to have some impact by recording three aces in the 2-0 victory. Remarkably, the 15 kills from those three rounds amounted to 42.9% of his kills in the best of three.

smooya returns to free agency

Late last year Owen "⁠smooya⁠" Butterfield, after a stellar stint individually in Movistar Riders put him back on tier one's radar, got the second chance he had yearned for when he joined fnatic on trial. And, it started brilliantly — the Brit starred in a run of consistently excellent online performances including a DreamHack Open November 2021 victory.

Since then, despite signing a two-year contract, smooya and fnatic's early promise has quickly unravelled. This decline can at least partly be attributed to the side's AWPer, with the 22-year-old struggling to make his aggressive style stick at tier one LANs like it had in practice and online events.

There is a reason the modern AWPer, embodied by the last two IEM Katowice MVPs Dmitry "⁠sh1ro⁠" Sokolov and broky, saves often and seldom re-peeks. smooya, for all his quality, rarely used the AWP in this way, something that is reflected in both his declining stats and his subsequent removal. Whether the Brit can bounce back from what he sees as a premature dismissal remains to be seen, but the style that enabled his dominance of tier two, ultimately, let him down in tier one.

k0nfig's return to form

Astralis' stock was so low before the event that a 7th-8th placed finish at Katowice was arguably an overperformance, which is something unheard of for such a successful organisation. Key to this was the return to form of aggressive rifler Kristian "⁠k0nfig⁠" Wienecke, displaying the sort of play that made his duo with Benjamin "⁠blameF⁠" Bremer such an attractive prospect for Lukas "⁠gla1ve⁠" Rossander to work with in the first place.

The addition of Asger "⁠Farlig⁠" Jensen relieves the burden of aggression on k0nfig and gla1ve slightly, but Astralis will still be reliant on Complexity's old star duo for the heavy lifting. k0nfig will experience peaks and troughs as all aggressive riflers do but Astralis will need him to be more consistent than he has been so far. At his best, he is one of the most impactful riflers in the world.

It's a Counter-Terrorist's world

There's been a lot of talk about how CT-sided the game is at the moment, with a lot of that conversation rightly centred on the 4-hit-kill of the $2,900 M4A1-S. For all five maps without asterisks attached — Ancient was pretty new at Cologne, and Dust2 was only played four times at Katowice — there is a heavy swing towards the defenders at Katowice compared to Cologne half a year earlier.

Whether this is as problematic as some have suggested is a topic for another day, but, with Valve's supposed tendency to prefer balance, this is something to keep an eye on at Pro League and beyond.