Preview of cs_summit 4

General information

The tournament will be taking place from 23 till 26 May at the new country Summit House in Los Angeles. The prize pool will consist of $150,000 and its division will be done by six teams. No preliminary qualifiers have taken place. All the teams got a chance to take part in the tournament thanks to direct invitations from the organizers. Let's remember that the main feature of the championships by Beyond The Summit is an easy atmosphere at their events. Instead of analysts wearing smart suits and looking into the camera seriously being afraid to say anything inappropriate, we are going to observe the same casters but in a different atmosphere. They will be sitting on the sofa wearing home clothes and telling us what is going on the screen, sharing their thoughts, joking and smiling around. This approach to the tournament can't be seen at any other event by any other company, so it means that it will be at least interesting to watch what is happening.

Main favorites

Team Liquid (position in the HLTV rating — #2)Win odds: 3.00

Now Team Liquid is in a great gaming shape. It is the only team that is close enough to drive Astralis from the top of the CS:GO Olimpia. After Stewie2k joined the team, the players started to play in a new way and now they seem to find their synergy, fixing each aspect of the game. All the members of the team are on their places and the team has useful trainings regularly and takes part in the tournament only in case if they are prepared to it well. Recently a new coach Adren has joined the team and we see that he has a big impact on development of the American team, adding new game pieces to Liquid's armory. On 5 May, the Americans became winners of Intel Extreme Masters Sydney 2019 where they won 3-2 over Fnatic at the final. This victory was uneasy for the team, however, Twistzz and the team still won the Australian championship. All the mentioned facts state that Team Liquid is the biggest favorite to win at this championship. The only team that can be a serious obstacle on the way of nitr0 and his teammates is ENCE.

Team Liquid roster and rating of the players:

Nicholas ‘nitr0’ Cannella — 1.06Jonathan ‘EliGE’ Jablonowski — 1.18Russel ‘Twistzz’ Van Dulken — 1.21Keith ‘NAF’ Markovic — 1.17Jacky ‘Stewie2k’ Yip — 1.08Eric ‘adreN’ Hoag — coach

ENCE (position in the HLTV rating — #3)Win odds: 3.50

The Finnish team is in a great gaming shape as well as Liquid. It is interesting that each of the players represents themselves in a new way. For instance, after their victory at StarSeries i-League Season 6, 17-year-old sergej became the best player. After the recent win at BLAST Pro Series Madrid 2019, Aerial got the title of MVP. We should also pay attention to the very championship where ENCE got the win on 11 May, BLAST Pro Series Madrid 2019. The team got a Wild Card invitation having no chance to gain a single BPS point to get to BLAST Pro Series Finals 2019. Nevertheless, ENCE got a victory winning over the Danish titans of the CS:GO world by the score of 2-0, breaking up their legendary series of 31 wins on Nuke. It's also noticeable that the Finnish got enough points to make it to World Final by BLAST Pro Series, as a couple of teams have bad results and they would lose against ENCE and the other strong teams in the tournament bracket of BLAST Pro Series Circuit.

The Finnish team is difficult to be considered as the main favorite of the upcoming championship due to the fact that there is such a participant as Team Liquid, however, ENCE can still be one of the pretendents of winning the event and the Finnish may surprise their audience and fans one more time.

ENCE roster and rating of the players:

Aleksi ‘allu’ Jalli — 1.09Aleksi ‘Aleksib’ Virolainen — 1.02Jere ‘sergej’ Salo — 1.11Jani ‘Aerial’ Jussila — 1.09Sami ‘xseveN’ Laasanen — 1.04Slaava ‘Twista’ Rasanen — coach

Teams that have a chance to win

Team Vitality (position in the HLTV rating — #11)Win odds: 5.00

Recently Vitality has won Charleroi Esports 2019, however this triumph couldn't be named as a prominent as only Tier-3 teams were taking part in the championship except for Team Vitality and G2 Esports. Now the French team is in a great mood. They won the last ten official matches, seven out of them were played at ESEA MDL Season 11. The other three are matches of the closed qualifiers for ESL One Cologne 2019, thanks to which Vitality got an invitation to the LAN final. Their gaming shape says that the French have a good chance to surprise the audience and to make it to the final where they are unlikely to win. Unlike ENCE and Liquid, Vitality has one very significant minus. Due to the fact that there is an Englishman Alex ‘ALEX’ McMeekin, all the other members of the team have to speak a non-native language. The French could speak good English, but all the players of ENCE are Finnish, so they speak Finnish, and representatives of Liquid are Canadian and American who speak English from their birth, so it can become a serious difficulty for Vitality and their success at cs_summit 4. Summing up everything that has been mentioned, in our opinion, Vitality will take the 3 place. If they're are very lucky, this team will take the second position in the tournament bracket and if anything goes wrong, the worst that can happen is the fifth place. It is really difficult for Vitality to perform worse than Ghost Gaming.

Team Vitality roster and rating of the players:

Nathan ‘NBK-’ Schmitt — 1.11Dan ‘apEX’ Madesclaire — 1.05Cedric ‘RpK’ Guipouy — 1.00Mathieu ‘ZywOo’ Herbaut — 1.30Alex ‘ALEX’ McMeekin — 0.98Remy ‘XTQZZZ’ Quoniam — coach

NRG Esports (position in the HLTV rating — #9)Win odds: 7.00

NRG Esports has a little chance to win the upcoming event. Their gaming shape could be much better and three out of six participants could be dangerous for the Americans if they want to pass to the final. We should notice, that at two last matches happened at IEM Sydney 2019 and ECS #7 NA Week 4, NRG lost. If their unsuccessful performance against Fnatic at IEM Sydney 2019 could be excused due to the fact that the Swedish are in a good gaming shape and they were six rounds away from the win at the tournament, so the loss of NRG at the quarterfinal of ECS Season 7 North America Week 4 couldn't be explained in any way. The team wasn't able to play appropriately and was in a bad shape. We think that they are unlikely to surprise us and they will perform at the tournament rather commonly taking the fourth or the fifth place, for example. We will find out soon whether we are right or not.

NRG Esports roster and rating of the players:

Damian ‘daps’ Steele — 0.84Vincent ‘Brehze’ Cayonte — 1.18Cvetelin ‘CeRq’ Dimitrov — 1.17Ethan ‘Ethan’ Arnold — 1.16Tarik ‘tarik’ Celik — 1.09Chet ‘ImAPet’ Singh — coach

Renegades (position in the HLTV rating — #10)Win odds: 7.00

Renegades surprised their audience with the performance at the first Major tournament in 2019 and showed that they deserve to be the strongest team in Australia. After that they started to lose their gaming shape and at the moment the team has mixed results. Renegades got to the 10 place in the top of the best CS:GO teams that had been presented by HLTV. In our opinion, Renegades are not prepared for fighting with such teams as Team Liquid and ENCE. They are more likely to have a good competition with Vitality and NRG. In the end, to our mind, Renegades will get placed on the 4 or 5 position in the tournament bracket.

Renegades roster and rating of the players:

Aaron ‘AZR’ Ward — 0.96Justin ‘jks’ Savage — 1.19Joakim ‘jkaem’ Myrbostad — 1.17Jay ‘liazz’ Tregillgas — 0.96Sean ‘Gratisfaction’ Kaiwai — 0.97Aleksandar ‘kassad’ Trifunovic — coach

Outsiders

Ghost Gaming (position in the HLTV rating — #26)Win odds: 21.00

The main outsider of the event should be Ghost Gaming. The team is placed on the 26 position in the world rating of CS:GO rosters and we don't think that the roster will be able to get higher than the sixth position in the tournament bracket of cs_summit 4. The only thing that could help the players from Ghost is their common native language, English, and also the fact that the team is territorially placed in America. It means that the team will not need to adapt to another time zone that is different from the one they are used to. Nevertheless, as well as the majority of viewers, we think that Ghost Gaming are to take the last place in the tournament bracket of cs_summit 4. If we take into account the fact that Ghost are in a fairly bad gaming shape, our doubts about their failure are getting away.

Ghost Gaming roster and rating of the players:

Matthew ‘Wardell’ Yu — 1.16Joshua ‘steel’ Nissan — 0.98Kenneth ‘koosta’ Suen — 1.12Jason ‘neptune’ Tran — 0.93Ryan ‘freakazoid’ Abadir — 1.05James ‘JamezIRL’ Macaulay — coach