The good, bad, and ugly of DreamHack Open Leipzig 2020

DreamHack Open Leipzig 2020 has come to a close and given CS:GO fans a plethora of new information and insight into some of the top teams for the 2020 season. BIG winning the event came as a surprise to me, but I would be lying if I said seeing Johannes "tabseN" Wodarz go off the way he did wasn't a treat to witness.

The good

BIG came out of the gates fast and hard. They truly looked like the best team at the tournament from the beginning and maintained that look throughout the entire tournament. tabseN ascended to new highs in his dominant performance and the entirety of BIG seemed to be firing on all cylinders.

Renegades surprised me. I didn't expect the Australians to do very well at this tournament. I had them finishing 5-6th, above Sprout and Virtus.pro, but boy did they prove me wrong. Chris "dexter"' Nong showed up big time for his squad and made me a believer in the Renegades roster.

MAD Lions and Heroic continue to battle for the "second-best team in Denmark" title. I thought this event would prove one over the other, but instead, I was still left pondering between the two.

The bad

Cloud9 underperformed by a large margin compared to where I had them, which was winning the event. They beat Virtus.pro, thankfully, but were beaten handily by Renegades twice. As I said earlier, Renegades look like a pretty good squad, but I don't think they are quite as good as Evil Geniuses or Team Liquid, who are the biggest competition for Cloud9 in North America. If C9 wants to even be considered the best team in North America, they have a lot of work to do.

North continues to struggle in 2020. They managed to beat Sprout, arguably the worst team at the event, but couldn't best their Danish counterparts in MAD Lions and Heroic. North added Mathias "MSL" Lauridsen and benched Jakob "JUGi" Hansen a little over a week ago. So, maybe they are still trying to figure things out as a new team, which is why they aren't in the ugly category quite yet.

The ugly

Virtus.pro can't seem to catch much of a break since they were acquired from AVANGAR in 2019. Their poor performances and placings continue into 2020 and it doesn't seem to be getting any better. Dzhami "Jame" Ali completely disappeared from this event and had one of the worst performances of his career.

Sprout is still a very new line-up, but they looked pitiful this weekend, winning only four rounds across two series. They played North and Heroic, who were not the two best teams at the event, and only managed that few numbers of rounds won. This was a horrible showing for the new German squad on home turf.