How Jame turned PARIVISION into contenders overnight

There was a perverse sense of inevitability about PARIVISION’s grand final win at BLAST Bounty.

Like Jame’s old Virtus.pro team, once they were ahead it felt like it was all over for a Falcons team who seemed to expend everything to beat Vitality in the semi-final - not dissimilarly to HEROIC in Rio.

Falcons ran out of steam on their impressive run, and in most cases PARIVISION beating them with a stand-in wouldn’t be all that crazy. In truth, it wasn’t that crazy in isolation, but what it meant, and how we got here, was.

PARIVISION were an unfancied, unglamourous underdog coming into the Major, though those who dug a little deeper definitely could see there was potential for them to be a lot more than a DreamEaters or The Huns. Their run beforehand was superb, albeit at a lower level, and the players while largely unknown by the wider public were definitely rated inside the scene even before this team.

There were a bunch of impressive wins, but the most eyecatching at the Majors were a demolishing of Liquid - notable because they are usually dominant against tier two teams - and a 2-0 over NIP, who up to that point had looked like a real threat.

And yet, the manner in which it petered out suggested that PARIVISION had hit their glass ceiling. MOUZ and NAVI beat them in BO1s, but most worryingly they went out 1-2 to 3DMAX, who are traditionally a gatekeeper team a la BIG, or indeed, Jame’s Virtus.pro team. If you can beat 3DMAX, you’re probably top 10, and if you can’t, you ain’t.

When you’ve hit your ceiling, you need a ceiling raiser - and fortunately one of them landed in their lap.

Anyone who’s ever played an RPG knows a zweihander is likely to make you do quite a bit more damage at the cost of any sort of mobility and defensive capabilities; but zweih is the best of both. He’s more stable and versatile than AW entirely because he does more damage. AW was useful as Jame’s new Sanji, but he was not a shooter, and zweih can do all the selfless stuff without being a liability in duels.

In fact, in our new Duel Swing metric that aims to quantify how much players ‘overperform’ in duels, as in, do they win duels they shouldn’t, or at least consistently win duels they should, zweih comes out looking very good. At least, in his first event; the win at BLAST Bounty.

There aren’t many cases where switching your fifth player really changes your fortune, but the firepower difference between AW and zweih is so vast that it’s as if they’ve upgraded their third star instead. Jame’s system, like many AWP-IGL systems, requires output from all four riflers more than others. Snappi, for example, necessitates at least one rifler who won’t be a consistent fragger, because it has Snappi on it. When you have an AWP-IGL, one of the big advantages is being able to have four capable riflers.

zweih and BELCHONOKK are two excellent anchors at any level, and that brings their floor up significantly, allowing a platform for their stars to shine. It’s a case of having very solid individuals for sure, but so much credit has to go to Jame.

This isn’t Jame’s first rodeo, and he’s a proven record at making a team more than its parts This is an IGL with a CV that’s better than nearly anyone else in the world bar the elite few, and he still is somehow underrated.

He’s been to two Major finals and won one of them, neither of which was with anything resembling a superteam (fame/FL1T is an excellent duo, but donk/sh1ro they are not). He’s won a tournament with PARIVISION against a field of top teams, and consistently had Virtus.pro around the top five playing a completely unique style of play.

That style of play has been tempered somewhat on PARIVISION, but at its fearsome best at VP/Outsiders it was possibly the hardest in the world to play against. Jame was chasing perfection; their style was an attempt to maximise every small edge of the economy, waste as much utility from the opposition as possible, and strike at the perfect moment. In many ways, the style when executed perfectly was genuinely unbeatable, because they would always have more utility than you if it worked.

The issue is that with humans, you can never be consistently perfect, and no plan ever goes unmeddled with. VP could never consistently win events because the style requires perfection for results to match, and that’s just not possible.

Still, it allowed them to punch well above their weight on their best days, and nobody liked playing against them. While the style has been changed slightly now to be a bit less adamantine, it retains the quality of trying to maximise small gains. It proves that Jame is not just a one-trick pony, and is, genuinely, one of the best IGLs in the world.

The list of IGLs who could achieve what he has with the teams he’s had is vanishingly small. Even karrigan needed superstars to win a Major.

On PARIVISION, he’s even more of a leader because he’s the elder statesman. He leads the style, the development and often the leaderboard too. Usually IGLs have to choose between performance and quality of leadership, and even in the modern day where every team seems to prioritise firepower, the IGLs that rise to the top tend to be those who don’t really need hands. There’s still lots of room for a brain amongst the brawn, but what lets Jame punch up is that he is a rare mix of both.

PARIVISION, because of this, have five capable fraggers where most teams have four. Jame teams usually make up for their lack of superstar power by sharing the load more evenly and having an IGL who actually puts up numbers, albeit with the AWP. Many AWPers have struggled on CS2, but it’s worth noting that Jame is basically the same player.

This lets them grind out games by targeting the weakest members, something that was very apparent at BLAST Bounty. They simply just hit the site with the worst player over and over, while daring you to do the same. Their weakest player is usually better than the opponents, which is perhaps just as important as your best vs their best.

As the old adage goes, you’re only as strong as your weakest link.

There was an air of ‘after the Lord Mayor’s show’ about IEM Krakow for PARIVISION, but they’ve still proven to be an absolute nightmare to play against. Wins over Aurora and HEROIC are not to be sniffed at, and the loss to Astralis that sent them home looked better after seeing how Astralis played in subsequent games.

HooXi has always been good at dealing with Jame too, for some reason. He just ‘gets’ his style.

It left us a little confused as to where PARIVISION will eventually land, but the future is bright. This team is still so young, and in Jame they have a leader with a proven track record of making teams like this top 10 teams and taking them further than they have any right to go.

PARIVISION aren’t going to be the best team in the world, and in truth, no Jame team likely ever will be. He’s never going to be an IGL of an elite team because he would struggle to get complete buy-in, and his style is a little inconsistent and honestly, boring for top players,, but counter-intuitively, he’s an elite IGL on teams who aren’t quite there.

This team will likely land around the 8-10th mark, and that’s an achievement. They’ve already won a trophy this year, well ahead of schedule, so anything else is a bonus.

PARIVISION have landed on a well-constructed team with the perfect IGL for what they want to do, and as always, balance will beat chaos in the end.

Believe in Jame. You won’t be disappointed.