What is blameF doing on BIG?

Why on donk’s green Earth is blameF playing for BIG?

It’s actually quite an interesting, layered question that ends up begging another: are BIG now good?

Both of these will be answered in this article, as it happens, but we’re not sure which way we’re going to go with either just yet. We’re going to decide with you as we go along. Seem fair?

Good.

blameF is a total unicorn in Counter-Strike. There is absolutely nobody quite like him. He puts up numbers like an elite player, he has four HLTV top 20 appearances, has the reputation of one among half the fans and analysts, but seemingly never gets his flowers from the scene or the other half. He has (or at least had) a very unique style, and clearly is capable of being an excellent player, but he’s never truly broken through as an elite player.

Why?

He’s had spells on good teams where he has been a stand-out player as everything crumbled around him, which should be the catalyst for someone to pull the trigger and put him in an elite team and watch him fly. He took Astralis as high as they’ve been since the halcyon days, he took fnatic to a Major, put up insane numbers on Complexity… he’s objectively very good at Counter-Strike.

But… he’s always a stand-out player as everything crumbles around him. Things always fall apart, and yet he comes up smelling of roses. His critics suggest this is a consequence of his style of play, at least in the past, where he was an unashamed, unabashed baiter. This is not like when you get a bit angry at a guy in FACEIT after you go way too aggressive - blameF was routinely using his teammates as meat shields or a battering ram while he cleaned up, or worse, sat on the other side of the map.

He was very good at it, and you could argue with a better four players around him it might have worked - but there must be something to it when ropz plays in a very similar way and yet signing him has always made the rest of the team better.

Is blameF not communicating well? Is he toxic, hard to play with and be around? Is his style really that hard to play with?

It’s impossible to really know from the outside, but his style has changed throughout the years. He’s never going to be YEKINDAR for a long period of time, but he has done some entrying at times. He’s nowhere near as passive or egregious with his baiting as he was on Astralis nowadays. He’s still trading a lot more than he’s being traded, but why would you want that to change?

He gets opening kills, but rarely entries in a traditional sense. He gets loads of kills and is alive for a long time, but doesn’t really have the clutch numbers to back it up. He’s got the ratings and K/Ds of a player who wins events and accolades, and yet doesn’t really have any.

It feels unfair to call him a statpadder, but… maybe he is?

He’s like Counter-Strike’s Trae Young - a guy who looks nice, scores a ton of points, but never really does much past the first round of playoffs and needs the team to play around him to really do it. Trae Young is still a very good player, but there’s a reason he’s a big fish in a small pond - which is where blameF thrives.

He’s on BIG because that’s where he’s supposed to be. Putting him on a bigger team exposes his flaws (he requires a lot of set-up and isn’t an amazing clutcher given his positions), but as a big fish in a small pond, there’s few better. He will drag an average-to-good team into conversations they do not belong, and he’ll look like the best player in the world while he’s doing it - until they come up against the actual elites. But… that’s far better than never being there at all.

Whether blameF is held back by his style (despite the fact that it is not the same as it was, it remains passive), his personality, or he’s simply not as good as the numbers suggest, he finds himself on a team like BIG ready to drag them back into the top 10, probably.

He is really, really good - but he also is suited to a team like this. A strange dichotomy.

So that begs the question, will BIG actually be any good?

Actually, we think so, yeah. There’s plenty of teams in that 6-30th bracket that are prime for beating, and BIG are actually in a very good spot to do so. blameF is IGLing and he knows how best to use himself, and this frees tabseN up to go and be a version of his old self. We’re not expecting prime tabseN, and quite frankly we shouldn’t need it.

Losing Krimbo undoubtedly hurts, but blameF is as good a replacement in terms of output (even if not a like-for-like replacement stylewise) as you could hope for, but the real piece that could change their fortune is gr1ks, who has already looked like he could be their best AWPer since… erm… COVID-era syrsoN?

That’s not a high bar, but gr1ks could clear it by a mile. He’s a very scary prospect, and BIG have needed an AWPer for as long as they’ve needed online events back. He immediately improves them - every top 10 team needs a very good AWPer, and gr1ks can be that. He’s not there yet, but he’s not far off.

JDC is a capable role player, tabseN if he’s even close to his best is good enough for a top 15 team, blameF can drag them up the rankings on his own and gr1ks looks great. faveN is the big question mark.

The writer of this piece was a huge fan of faveN back before his first stint on BIG, so this is very hard to write. faveN looked like he would easily be the best German player back then, but a combination of poor adaptation, misprofiling, illness and, yes, weak performances left faveN’s stock as low as it’s ever been, and he’s never really hit the heights hoped for him.

He’s now back home in Germany, and he’s not expected to be a superstar, so hopefully with the lights down a bit lower he can refind his old form and turn this team from a top 15-20 team to a top 10 team.

It sounds implausible, but Aurora, B8 and 3DMAX are not more talented than BIG, and BIG always come with interesting gimmicks and a solid backbone system, so they can crack top 10 this year.

In short - yeah, they might be good, but it depends on faveN, really.