ESL Challenger Jönköping 2023 Europe Open Qualifier

Favorites falter in ESL's first CS2 qualifier

4-10-2023 23:12

The ESL Challenger Jönköping open qualifier provided many a banana peel for the top teams in attendance.

Aurora was the highest-ranked team to qualify

Aurora, Looking4Org,The Chosen Few, and Grindas have qualified for the ESL Challenger Jönköping EU closed qualifier after battling their way through a 284 team open bracket.

The MR12 single-elimination part of the bracket claimed the lives of Falcons, Sprout, 9INE, OG, and BetBoom before we even reached the HLTV-featured round-of-sixteen portion of the event.

More upsets followed, with Preasy, 00NATION, Bad News Eagles, and 1win also falling in the best-of-ones. Andrey "⁠Jerry⁠" Mekhryakov's new PARIVISION squad made it to the final round but could not get past Looking4Org.

The tournament switched to best-of-threes for the qualification matches, but that did not save FORZE from falling to the big surprise of the event in the form of Grindas. The Lithuanian mix upset Sprout in overtime and then FORZE 2-1 to book their spot in the closed qualifier.

Small technical issues popped up in the early rounds, and they reared their head again on the new game when server and match medic issues in the PARIVISION-Looking4Org caused a lengthy pause.

The successful teams from this qualifier will join four invited teams in the EU closed qualifier that is due to kick off on October 9. The winner of that closed qualifier will then book their spot at the Jönköping event at DreamHack Winter in November.

The teams that will attend the EU closed qualifier are:

lol

2023-10-04 23:13

2 replies

OG is never a favorite.

2023-10-06 00:29

1 reply

true honestly

2023-10-10 11:14

POG

CS2 is going to be rough for every team to adapt to it seems...

2023-10-04 23:32

12 replies

cs2 is like a soft-reset in terms of skillgap so obviously it will change some things up but mr12 bo1 is complete utter bullshit. how can they seriously think this is a good idea without the eco-system having received any updates yet?!

2023-10-04 23:39

8 replies

Yeah, I would say that the BO1 MR12 format is singlehandedly the reason so many teams lost and were upset. Such a horrendous format that didn't work in 1.3 and doesn't work now. That's just my opinion, though.

2023-10-04 23:42

3 replies

it was even worse in older cs versions because you could hard reset economy and it's still bullshit with latest csgo economy as it shows. was the mr12 change really necessary?! this is not valulrant, it's CS ffs

2023-10-04 23:44

Necessary? Definitely not. I've always been against the MR12 change, though.

2023-10-04 23:51

Cuz ur npc

2023-10-05 13:06

Wasn't the whole point of MR12 to make BO1s redundant and replace them with BO3s?

2023-10-05 01:44

The point was to reduce match time, BO3 MR12 would be longer than BO1 MR15. I prefer if they just kept MR15, always BO3, and reduce match time another way (round length, bomb length, smoke length, TO amount and length, etc.)

2023-10-05 04:48

But i mean, now that matches are shorter, BO3s are more reasonable and less time consuming than when they did MR15 BO3s, so TO's would be able to use them more for less upsets like these

2023-10-05 07:04

That's what I thought

2023-10-05 05:01

Probably

2023-10-05 00:41

Pro level CS has been garbage for too long. If this all shakes the system up and forced teams to actually practice and up their game, then that’s a good thing

2023-10-05 19:41

Yeah, I can see your point. Pro-CS has been pretty good as of late, though. Upsets have happened way more frequently than before.

2023-10-05 20:36

this game is so boring to watch compared to csgo

I think a lot would agree that CSGO was boring to watch compared to CS 1.6, but to each his own. It will take time for everyone to adapt to CS2 - the game isn't perfect and has a lot of issues, but it can only get better with time.

2023-10-04 23:35