FURIA drop a series to GamerLegion in Fort Worth - Day one

FURIA lost from a 1-0 start against a GamerLegion team who had been in the news for much less savoury reasons this past few days.

It's not quite crisis time for FURIA just yet, but this year has been, at least relative to last year, somewhat disastrous. GamerLegion are an org in crisis and a team treading water who are simply not as scary as they were last year (and even then they weren't exactly Frankenstein), and yet they've quite comfortably bested FURIA in the final two maps.

Most concerning is the form of molodoy; he was untouchable on Inferno and we thought we might have the old molodoy back, but he slipped back into his middling 2026 form on Nuke and Mirage as REZ and then PR took over the server. It's worrying, because molodoy was the saviour of AWPing. The chosen one to bring back fun, aggressive AWPing.

Their T sides on the final two maps were pretty awful, with just five rounds over the two maps. KSCERATO had just four T side kills in the final two maps.

Again, concerning.

We’re not sounding the alarm just yet on Vitality, but it’s a little troubling that they’ve managed to lose a map to FUT, with a stand-in, on their own map pick, with a +23 differential on the AWPer. A couple of months ago that was unthinkable.

Yes, yes, of course it’s ‘only’ BLAST Rivals and they’re probably not all that bothered (they’ve admitted as much), but still, a map loss is a map loss. ZywOo 30-bombed Dust 2 as cmtry got just seven kills, and FUT still won 13-11. How, you ask?

We watched the game, and can’t really tell you. FUT picked up seven T side rounds to win the game even with ZywOo collecting 14 souls on the defense. He was over a kill per round and they lost the half!

Obviously, it doesn’t really matter because Vitality won the series, and that we’re getting ‘worried’ because they lost a map says a lot really. It would have been a lot less worrying had Vitality closed out their 11-1 lead on Nuke more cleanly than quite literally having to win round 24 (!?), but a win is a win.

It’s just… this didn’t really feel like Vitality.

G2 were largely untroubled as they rolled over Astralis in two maps in pretty convincing fashion.

Astralis are a solid team, but their lack of individual brilliance (outside of Staehr, who continues to impress) was on show here as they were overpowered by a hard-shooting G2 team. We’re sort of burying the lede here a bit, though, as this did largely come down to ryu getting five kills.

Not on a single map, in the whole series. At least he improved throughout - he had two kills on map one, and increased that total by 50% in the second series. He might have gotten 4.5 kills if it had gone to a third.

That was mean. Sorry.

Sometimes it’s just not your day, and it was aggressively not ryu’s day last night.

FaZe woke up too late in their series with NAVI to take the win, but were at least entertaining and encouraging in a series against top opposition.

A 1-11 start to Anubis made this series look like it might be another classic FaZe capitulation, but they posted six rounds on their T side at least, and could easily have won Ancient on another day. They were up 10-5 on Ancient near the start of their T side, but NAVI won eight of the next nine to break FaZe's hearts and ruin poor Neityu's debut.

He wasn't great on Ancient. He did topfrag Anubis at least.

makazze's remarkably consistent top-fragging has become a feature of NAVI this year, and once more he topped the charts. He just gets his kills, every time. What a player.