Berlin International Gaming became champions of the first notable CS:GO tournament for this decade, triumphing on home soil at DreamHack Open Leipzig.
BIG go big in Leipzig
The home crowd was surely pleased by what they saw from their local heroes. BIG looked better than ever this past weekend and played well above what their world ranking would suggest. The new boys Nils “k1to” Gruhne and Florian “syrsoN” Rische seemed to fit right away and were an integral part of this lineup’s fantastic result in its first-ever LAN event.
When I say BIG looked better than ever, I’m not exaggerating. They enjoyed a flawless run through the tournament, without dropping a map and not a single hint that this is a lineup. Renegades, in particular, felt BIG’s claws on their back as the Aussies got beaten not once, but twice by their European counterparts.
Renegades were first taken care of in Group A’s winners’ match, but their hopes of revenge in the final were broken mercilessly by the hyped-up Germans who completed their run to the trophy without losing more than 12 rounds on any of the maps they played. Team captain Johannes “tabseN” Wodarz was giving his subordinates an excellent example with his own play and finished the tournament with as the unanimous MVP, holding a 1.36 rating through the four games he played.
The next major event on the calendar is BLAST Premier Spring Series which is starting January 31. An invite-only tournament, it would go on without Berlin International Gaming, whose poor showings in late 2019 cost them a lot of prestige. It’s still unknown which LAN will host the German team next, but if their form in Leipzig is anything to go by, the invites will start flowing their way soon enough.
