The GG.Bet Ice Challenge 2020 teams and event formats have been announced.
godIn February, the eight players will visit London to bid for the $250,000 prize pool in their portion of the competition. The $125,000 first-place award is best won by Natus Vincere and mouse games.
Although they are the most popular teams on paper, OG is to take part in their second ICE Challenge competitions, with ENCE eSports, MAD Lions, Virtus.pro, Team Heroic and GODSENT being part of them.
The ICE Challenge will be played at the ExCeL Convention Center in London, England and will include a traditional, best-of-three group stage with playoffs.
The team at the last spot will be relegated after two days of group play, while the remainder of the six playoffs is taken away. The group stage will take place from 1 to 2 February, followed by the 4 to 6 February playoffs. The two-match groups have yet to be revealed by GG.Bet.
The ICE Challenge is the first LAN for many participating teams by 2020 and should provide an early reading of all the positions they all serve in the new year. The GG.Bet ICE Challenge will be the first LAN in 2020.
Second in the world, in the past three months mouse sports have been almost unstoppable. Finnish “karrigan” Andersen’s squad is strong and the veteran in – the-game leader makes use of every aspect of his staff. Even if EPICENTER 2019 fails, mouz can only improve with a list of talents.
- Chris “chrisJ“de Jong
- Robin “ropz” Kool
- David “frozen” Čerňanský
- Finn “karrigan” Andersen
- Özgür “woxic” Eker
On-screen, Natus Vincere is by a considerable margin the main challenge for mouse sports. Unhappily, the return of “GuardiaN” Kovács’ from Ladislav to the Na’Vi roster stifled Oleksandr “s1mple” Kostyliev, the team star player. Statistics show Na’Vi was more injured than helped by the return of GuardiaN.
Na’Vi slums down and the team can do nothing but find a better balance among the two biggest names.
The newly formed OG needs time to gel before fans can know the future of the squad. Nevertheless, if the team is able to make progress in London, particularly with teams like MAD Lions and GODSENT, fans will start to get excited.
The squad does not have enough knowhow to dominate most of the CSGO universe although they may never be prepared to face the top mouse competition. The new lineup of OG consists of the following:
- Nathan “NBK-” Schmitt
- Aleksi “Aleksib” Virolainen
- Valdemar “valde” Bjørn
- Issa “ISSAA” Murad
- Mateusz “mantuu” Wilczewski
VP and ENCE also participated in the 2019 major CSGO finals but ended the year nasty. ENCE is still grappling with the effect of the exit from Aleksib to OG, and it didn’t appear to be a great move toward this stage to Virtus.pro’s purchase of AVANGAR.
Fans have cause for concern if both can not find their form at the ICE Challenge. For either of these teams, there does not seem to be a specific problem, and people would expect that both have worked hard to correct their issues in the last month.
Of these, the GG.Bet ICE Tournament is better suited for Virtus.pro. Dzhami “Jame” Ali Virtus.pro is backed by an offensive playstyle and frightening AWPer:
- Timur “buster” Tulepov
- Alexey “qikert” Golubev
- Sanjar “SANJI” Kuliev
- Dzhami “Jame” Ali
- Dauren “AdreN” Kystaubayev
