CS:GO is the rising star of the eSports community, it has been for some time now, and somehow it seems like its best years are yet to come. Just like all other aspects of life though, CS:GO also went through some challenges in 2020 (fingers pointing at Valve’s direction once again), but there were a bunch of brilliant moments, enough for the overall feeling of rise and progress. Hint: it didn’t hurt that Neymar (yes, that Neymar) started streaming the game on Twitch.

All Of The Last Year’s Ups And Downs In CS:GO

First of all, there is always something happening in the industry, be it regional tournaments or new updates for the game, and mid-January we’ve just received the news about the game hitting a million players online at the same time of the day for almost two months: the first time in history for the game to do that was in March 2020. Also, IEM Katowice 2020, which was the last LAN CS:GO tournament before the pandemic, so a record viewing of more than one million. Not everything was stellar though: you don’t have to go far in the past to revisit the big scandal with the spectator bug exploit and 37 banned coaches, that happened in the fall of 2020.

We’ve seen some major transfers throughout the year, one of the most prominent being es3tags leaving for Cloud 9 from Astralis for 2,1 million dollars. Es3tag’s 2020 transfers gained a lot of attention throughout the whole year since he was also in the middle of the drama between Heroic, FunPlus Phoneix, and Astralis back in March. But, the biggest transfer everybody talked about the most was definitely NiKo leaving FaZe Clan for G2. And although G2 themselves described the transfer as “one of the biggest signings in CS:GO history”, they didn’t disclose any numbers around it, so we can only guess.

What Happened Over The Winter Break

The biggest teams and players, which include teams like Astralis, Vitality, or Natus Vincere, have ended the year with a half-million worth IEM Global Challenge, and have had a well-deserved holiday break, but they are just about to make the big return with BLAST Premier just a few days away.

While some were resting, the winter player break was pretty active for others. Namely, some transfers, which will premiere at BLAST, happened: junior transferred from Triumph to FURIA, Cloud9, who had a very active roster year, apparently had two more acquisitions; Xeppaa from Chaos Gen.G coach Elmapuddy joined. The Brazilian legend FalleN will join Team Liquid, and his former team, MIBR, has just announced their new roster.

What Awaits Us Certainly And Possibly

Some of those changes await us at BLAST Premier: Global Final 2020, with a million dollars at stake. A grand final of the BLAST Premier series of tournaments held through last year, also the first year for the concept, will be held from January 19^th to January 24^th. There are a few teams from the current top ten that aren’t going to participate, since they didn’t qualify, like Heroic, BIG, OG, and mousesports, but there is plenty to look forward to, and the schedule has already been announced.

Also, at the very beginning of the year, we’ve been welcomed by great news about the first CS:GO Major in two years. PGL will host it in Stockholm in October and November, and it will be the first time that an event will be streamed in 4K resolution instead of the standard 1080p. They’ve also announced that there will be “Augmented Reality elements, brand new custom HUD and other brand new features.” Other than that, the prize pool is set to 2 million dollars, the largest in CS:GO, and the plan is to have an audience of 16,000 in Ericsson Globe, but we’ll have to wait and see about that.

So now you have all of the information necessary to track current events (and look forward to the next ones). We’ve gathered all of that for you, so it would be silly not to use it: visit our free to play Pick6 to utilize that knowledge – don’t let it go to waste!