BLAST Bounty - Matchups, favourites and preview

It's the first event of the year, and no matter what, that makes it bloody exciting.

There's new teams, returning teams, big teams, legendary players from the current day, and legendary players from yesteryear. It's gonna be a party.

BLAST Bounty is always a fun one because of its unique wrinkle where the lower ranked teams pick their opponents in the opening round out of the higher ranked teams - with some very fun looking matchups, not least EYEBALLERS vs FaZe.

EYEBALLERS aren't a team of huge note, but they do have JW, and watching JW play Counter-Strike is always a joy, even ten years on. FaZe when they're not in a big game are very beatable, and this looks like it could be a smart big from Unc JW.

Some other super fun match-ups include Astralis vs fnatic, which would have been a massive game about eight years ago, NIP vs Liquid (ditto, but also a new look NIP in a winnable game) and OG vs FUT, which is sort of quietly a really fun game of upcoming talent.

Match-ups in round one

• BetBoom vs paiN
• fnatic vs Astralis
• M80 vs Gentle Mates
• Passion UA vs GamerLegion
• HOTU vs Aurora
• NIP vs Liquid
• NRG vs HEROIC
• EYEBALLERS vs FaZe
• Inner Circle vs 3DMAX
• OG vs FUT
• 9INE vs FURIA
• ENCE vs PARIVISION
• VP vs Vitality
• MONTE vs NAVI
• SINNERS vs Spirit
• ECSTATIC vs Falcons

The favourites

As always, Vitality are going to be favourites having won the Major. Arguably the best team of all time, it's quite hard to argue that they aren't the ones you'd put your money on if you had to. They've got an incredible amount of firepower, they're one of the smartest teams in the world with time to work on any flaws they might have, and they've just won the Major. Twice in a year.

Virtus.pro is not an easy opening game, though, and they're coming in cold. Fortunately, they only need top eight.

You can't discount FURIA, also. Their opening game is much easier, and despite their bottlejob at the Major they were nearly untouchable going into it. They've beaten Vitality in finals and won multiple tournaments, and just because they didn't win the Major doesn't mean they actually got any worse.

Spirit are always dangerous, and with their 'new' roster (that consists of two returning players and three staying on) maybe their luck can change. They haven't won an event since Cologne, but they have donk. There's not really any analysis worth doing beyond that.

We'd be a bit higher on Falcons if they'd gone ahead and made the changes they have been threatening to make since inception. They haven't made any changes, so we don't expect them to have suddenly gotten better than FURIA and Vitality now.

They should be fine here, though.

New teams worth watching

The aforementioned Spirit and also Aurora are the only two top eight teams who made any changes, with soulfly representing what is likely to be Aurora's last shot at making a full Turkish team work at this level. He seems like he might be decent, but you never know until he's tested at this level.

We have a new-look Astralis who are no longer full Danish, which is a bit of a strange sight. We're not expecting fireworks; while ryu and phzy are both serviceable-to-good players, they're not exactly superstars who are going to drive Astralis back to the glory days, but they are likely an upgrade on device and Magisk in 2026.

paiN are debuting vsm and piriajr, HEROIC now have susp and Chr1zN and PARIVISION brought in the baby-faced zweih. There's a handful of others worth watching - cairne on NIP is exciting and JBa on M80 for example, but these are the main ones.

Closing thoughts

Watch BLAST Bounty. It's the first event of the year and it's a great format to get started with. It's like a lovely palate pleasing starter before the big ones start, even if it's a qualifier for a LAN. There's new teams galore and big stakes.

We don't expect much to change in terms of who the best teams are, and it's a bit of a shame that none of the big boys have done something crazy or... well, done anything at all in the roster shuffle. We can't see anything but the top four staying the top four for now.

Welcome to a new year of the greatest game ever.