Elliott Griffiths

What we are witnessing right now is not normal.

Normality has resumed in Rio as the two best players in the world have reached the grand final in 2-0 fashion.

Spirit and Vitality both cruised into the semi-finals with consummate ease in a day overshadowed by FalleN's retirement.

A teary-eyed FalleN today announced his retirement from Counter-Strike after an illustrious 21 year career.

This is the best chance we've got at Vitality not winning a trophy.

The best team of all time has been felled - but remain in contention - by Team Falcons.

We're not sure what the bigger shock was; Vitality dropping a map, or donk having a four kill map against Falcons.

It was a strong start to Rio for all of the big boys, with a 13-0 along with multiple other stomps included.

While Vitality are likely to win yet again, there is still plenty to get your teeth stuck into at IEM Rio and plenty to enjoy.

FUT get their proof-of-concept win at PGL Bucharest with an emphatic win over Astralis.

We launched our newest tools this week, and we've been cooking in the lab.

We can't think of anyone who's ever suffered as much over Easter as FaZe Clan. Well, alright, maybe ONE guy, but at least he'd come back to life by now.

We take a few days off between big tournaments to write some data-driven pieces and look what happens. Absolute chaos.

Team Vitality look absolutely, utterly unbeatable at this moment in time. It’s getting to the point where even imagining a team that can beat them is becoming infeasible, a folly of the forum poster and delusional Brazilian Twitter poster.

The bigger they are, the harder they fall is a proverb that, unlike many others, is both literally and figuratively true, and there are few bigger in Counter-Strike than FaZe Clan.

Team Vitality are the best team of all time, and it's getting harder and harder to find a reasonable argument against that statement.

Vitality coasted to an easy win over a pretty lacklustre Aurora - though who can blame them.

As everyone raced in to blame some variation of Team Spirit leadership, be it magixx, Hally or both, there was one lone voice that leapt to the defence of the new leader of Spirit.

Often, when a player racks up loads of kills and his team loses, there's a little bit of nuance to it and maybe he wasn't playing quite as well as the surface numbers suggest. This was not one of those cases.

It was a great day to be a big dog in Rotterdam.