OG's World Final qualification exposes major flaws in BLAST's Leaderboard

OG qualified for the BLAST Premier World Final despite a largely disappointing year, leaving behind teams that deserved the spot more but were snubbed by a deeply flawed system.

The crown jewel of BLAST's tournament circuit, the $1 million BLAST Premier World Final, is around the corner. It kicks off on Wednesday, December 14, bringing to the stage eight teams who earned their spots either by winning at least one of the Majors (FaZe and Outsiders), ESL Pro League seasons (Vitality), and BLAST Finals (Natus Vincere and HEROIC), or thanks to their placing in the BLAST Leaderboard.

The Leaderboard was responsible for inviting the final three teams to the Abu Dhabi event — G2, OG, and Liquid — and it is where we get into the crux of the issue. This special ranking was supposed to produce the teams who performed the best throughout the year without winning one of the six qualifying events, and it creates the illusion of doing just that by awarding points for placings in nearly all top tournaments on the calendar. But it fails miserably at achieving that — and it does so by design.

How did a resumé as disappointing as OG's yield them an invitation to Abu Dhabi?

OG's qualification for the upcoming World Final exposes just how poorly made the Leaderboard is. In no world can OG be considered one of the three teams who performed the best outside of the quintet who won the qualifying events. For one, they didn't even play at some of the most competitive and prestigious tournaments of the year, failing to qualify for PGL Major Antwerp, IEM Cologne, and IEM Dallas. OG mostly failed to perform even at the Big Events they did play, bombing out of IEM Katowice in 13th-16th place, exiting the IEM Rio Major in the Challengers Stage (17th-19th), and finishing last at the BLAST Premier Fall Final. Their only deep run at a Big Event this year was at the BLAST Premier Spring Final, where they made it to the semi-finals.

So how did a team with a resumé as disappointing as that make it to the World Final, a tournament that is supposed to crown the "ultimate Champion" of 2022? By earning the vast majority of their Leaderboard points through top-three placements at the two BLAST Premier Groups. So egregious is OG's case that 5,300 out of the 6,300 points they earned come from their achievements in the Groups — a staggering 84%. The only other thing they had to do to qualify for the World Final was to make it to the top four at the Spring Final in Lisbon, which was OG's only big achievement of the entire year.

BLAST Leaderboard (top 15)

* Excluding teams who qualified for the World Final directly by winning at least one of the Majors, ESL Pro League seasons, or BLAST Premier Finals

1. G2 - 6,625 points - Qualified (Partner)
2. OG - 6,300 points - Qualified (Partner)
3. Liquid - 6,212.5 points - Qualified (Partner)
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4. ENCE - 5,950 points
5. Ninjas in Pyjamas - 5,100 points (Partner)
6. Astralis - 4,700 points (Partner)
7. FURIA - 4,350 points
8. Cloud9 - 3,950 points
9. BIG - 2,950 points (Partner)
10. MIBR - 2,200 points (ex-Partner)
11. paiN - 1,850 points
11. Fluxo - 1,850 points
13. MOUZ - 1,812.5 points
14. Spirit - 1,625 points
15. Complexity - 1,500 points (Partner)
15. Evil Geniuses - 1,500 points (Partner)

The reason why this is a problem is that the BLAST groups are the only entirely closed tournaments of the year, inviting only the 12 BLAST partners, and the least prestigious and competitive "top" competitions on the calendar at the moment. They are a glorified qualifier that has no single winner, where just finishing in the top half and making it to the Final is the ultimate goal. They feature one of the least competitive formats, in which you can lose more maps than you win and even lose more matches than you win and still succeed.

Despite this, the Groups are by far the most important event of the year according to the BLAST Leaderboard system currently in place, because each of the three "gauntlets" of the Groups is considered a separate tournament in practice. Groups award a total of 15,300 points each season due to this, while the Majors award 6,000 (not including the meaningless points for the winner, who guarantees a World Final spot) and IEM Katowice or Cologne points add up to 8,000. A win of one "gauntlet" of BLAST — which basically equals winning two BO1s and two BO3s, or three BO1s and one BO3 — awards a team a total of 2,650 points, 650 more than what second place at a Major is worth. And keep in mind, three teams earn this much in each BLAST Premier Groups season.

Due to BLAST competitions giving away Leaderboard points to every single participant in their events, the 12 BLAST partners are guaranteed to share 40,400 of the 101,000 points on offer over a year in the absolute worst case scenario where they all bomb out early of the Showdowns and place in the bottom six at the Finals. Of that, 30,600 points come from BLAST Groups, the part of the circuit that is completely closed to non-partners. In comparison, placings in the top eight at both Majors, IEM Katowice, IEM Cologne, both ESL Pro League seasons, and IEM Dallas, add up to 42,400 points — and this is the best case scenario, with no guarantees for just playing in the tournament, as those tournaments feature 16 or even 24 teams and points only go to the top eight.

The system was rigged against non-partners. It's nearly impossible to qualify for the World Final based on the Leaderboard without being a part of the BLAST circuit in a fairly substantial way, and that can be extremely difficult for non-partners. They often have to go through multiple sets of qualifiers just to make it to the Showdown, which then only has one Final spot on offer. ENCE came the closest as a non-partner, missing out on a spot by less than 300 points, but even with their multiple deep runs in the first half of the year and a win at the Spring Showdown, their performances weren't deemed impressive enough compared to OG's, apparently:

Who would you say was the better team in 2022?

But let's for a second forget about comparing OG's resumé to the likes of ENCE or Cloud9, who had some serious achievements to their name throughout the year as non-partners. Playing devil's advocate, you can at the very least understand why BLAST would want their partners to play at their tournaments as much as possible from a business perspective. But just look at what Ninjas in Pyjamas — another BLAST partner — achieved this year and you'll find yourself wondering how BLAST ended up making a system so flawed that it even failed to recognize who their best partners were, let alone the best teams of the year overall.

Ninjas in Pyjamas placed in the top eight in Katowice and Cologne as well as in Antwerp, and in the top four at ESL Pro League Season 15 and the BLAST Premier Fall Final. Barring the last, these were four of the six most competitive tournaments of the year. That trumps OG's two BLAST Groups 'wins' and a top-four in Lisbon by a country mile, and yet BLAST's system didn't recognize that it could have had a much better partner compete at the World Final.

With a system that so egregiously overvalues the BLAST Premier Groups, BLAST is effectively shooting itself in the foot, because not only is that one of the least competitive top tournaments on the calendar as a whole, it is not even the most important BLAST competition. The World Final is now much worse for it, having invited a team that has no business being considered one of the eight best of 2022.