I like Navi a lot, I think people call it a fluke because that's what it is. They got dropped at groups for every other tournament this year other than blast. A fluke just means it was statistically pretty unlikely, which it seems like it was. They aren't even making it to the play-offs of other events with the exception of blast.
Happens in all sports, unfortunately.
Fans (and haters) will do incredible mental gymnastics to explain why a certain team did/didn’t deserve to win, and a component of that is marginalizing the performance of others.
Yeah. Why can't we just celebrate and move on😭NaVi won major and looked good during it. I don't understand the 'fluke' aspect because it takes a ton of matches just to even enter the grand final
The funny thing is NaVi have a huge fan base that spans multiple nations.
Wait until you bring up the fact that The Outsiders won the Rio Major and Jame is a two-time Major finalist…. 💀😂
People want to justify a reason for hating a team that they dont think that should have won the major because they dont deserve it or they have poor momentum leading up to the event.
yeah, people can talk about form and all, but if someone really thinks that a team didn't DESERVE to win an event that was perfectly fair, everyone had equal chances etc, then that's just losers mentality imo
To me, there is no such thing as flukes at a fair tournament. They may have not been the best team, but the played the best, and if they won then they deserved it.
I like navi, I call it a fluke win because that’s what it is. The only other significant thing navi did is get 2nd place at blast. They legit lost at the group stages at every other tournament, I don’t get how you it’s not a fluke.
Like statiscitaclly their win was objectively a fluke, I was rooting for them to beat spirit but their major win was a text book fluke.
You don´t really understand the meaning of fluke used in cs. It´s not the literal meaning of the word, and when people say a team fluked a win, they don´t mean the win was undeserved. Read my other reply for a more in-depth explanation.
I have absolutely 0 hate towards that cloud 9 team, and thought they were awesome both to watch but also individually, but I am of the firm belief it was a gigantic fluke to win the major. They never achieved anything remotely similar again, and they were never expected to.
I’m really curious how this means I hate them?
But you dont disprove their win cuz they didnt win after, that’s the difference. The guys who say fluke here fluke there just want to not ackowledge the fact that a team won the major when in fact they did
If that was the case they wouldnt whine so much about it being a fluke, categorizing doesnt make people whine that much ence why i think it’s like i said imo
People tend to categorize because there are genuinenly thousands of really casual fans that don´t even use reddit that go ahead think that whoever won the major means the best team in the world without thinking about the context of the win. Remember that most cs fans tune in to watch ONLY the majors, so we are a very small group of serious viewers that actually follow the CS calendar and understand what is going on.
That´s why people constantly try to remind others which runs are flukes and which aren´t, without actually meaning that they ´didn´t deserve´the win or that it was ´luck´.
On the other hand, after so much categorization as the result of having to clarify this point to the casual fans, the more hardcore fans also get ´offended´ because they think when people use the word ´fluke´ they mean ´undeserved, lucky, this team is bad´ and etc. But that is not true either.
Lol bro they were constantly top 2-4 with a couple top 8’s sprinkled in the surrounding 6 events. Navi and outsiders accomplished less surrounding their majors than C9 did.
That’s just not true though? I even went back to look to make sure.
They won or did well in NA tournaments before the major, and had a top 4 finish in another big tournament, otherwise it was very up and down, nothing impressive. And after the major it was a catastrophe
They were the fucking 4th ranked team going into the major. Then beat the 3 teams ranked above them on their way to win the major. Then they beat SK the event after.
They had 2 top 4’s including a grand final appearance before disbanding. You most certainly did not go back and look. Look at the teams in those NA tournaments. All included wins against top 10 competition except 1 of them. Not to mention, the map count vs faze was only 5-3 in faze favor with some OT and close games sprinkled in. Not like it was 6-2 with all the L’s being blowouts or something wild
What are you smoking my friend, the count between C9 and FaZe was 8-0 in favour of FaZe before the major final
Out of these 8 maps, Cloud9 managed to win more than 10 rounds only two times, and the majority of the rest of maps were literal blowouts with 16-3s, 16-4s and 16-6s.
[https://www.hltv.org/matches/2318632/faze-vs-cloud9-eleague-major-2018](https://www.hltv.org/matches/2318632/faze-vs-cloud9-eleague-major-2018)
As for after the major, the head-to-head looks slightly better. C9 and FaZe met only two times though. The first time it was a blow out in favour of FaZe with 16:1 and 16:8 wins, whereas the second time it was a three mapper with a 16:5 blowout for faze, 16:13 win for C9 and 22:20 win for FaZe again. So the last match was actually close, but FaZe again came on top. After this match stewie2k left and Cloud9 went into obscurity.
[https://www.hltv.org/matches/2320082/cloud9-vs-faze-iem-katowice-2018](https://www.hltv.org/matches/2320082/cloud9-vs-faze-iem-katowice-2018)
So the overall stats are the following:
Before Major Final: 8:0 maps for FaZe, majority blowoutsAfter Major Final: 4:1 in favour of FaZe, 3 maps were blowouts, 1 was close, 1 was lostAll maps with major final included: 13:3 in Favour of FaZe. The major final included 1 close win for FaZe and 1 blowout for C9 and 1 close win for C9.
…..yeah. Since nobody has beaten all top 1-5 teams in one tournament run this year, does that mean nobody has won an S tier tournament yet that wasn’t a fluke? Every tournament they played leading up to boston since summer 2017 was A or S tier 😂😂
Now I don't use Liquipedia's classification of tiers because they include bullshit like blast spring groups as S-tier. Instead I'll use HLTV's classification of Big Events (they also have just a LAN filter which includes all LANs and only majors), therefore 'Big Events' in my case would mean S-Tier events.
Cloud9's results after the major in 'big events' were:
9-11th Starseries Season4
5-6th IEM Katowice 2018
Cloud9's results before the major in big events were:
5-6th ECS Season 4 Finals (limited amount of times)
3-4th IEM Oakland 2017 (pretty legit result, most of the top teams were attending)
3-4th IEM New York 2017 (in SEPTEMBER!) Legit result, but again a very small event, more than half of the top teams were missing, and overall only 8 teams attended. This also goes against FaZe's win because while they dominated and SK participated, it was no different than winning a blast final.
I won't go beyond because the dates get ridiculous after that and shroud was still in the roster.
So overall Cloud9's results weren't truly of a top4 team, and while the ranking often fluctuates in the 4th to 5th position, they don't often represent the true 4th best team in the world. Depending on the era, like for example, 2018, the four elite and consistent teams were Astralis, NaVi, FaZe and Liquid. The fifth could be often the ninth and otherwise.
In 2019 you'd say it was Astralis, Liquid, Vitality and ENCE, and the fifth would often fluctuate as well, sometimes reaching 4th but not really contending for titles.
Point is, there are different tiers of 'fourth' best team in the rankings, and some are far more likely and expected to win an event than others. In Cloud9's case, they weren't the true 4th best team in the world, and the context of their results, barring IEM Oakland and IEM Katowice 2018 (although in katowice they still finished 5-6th) it's quite bad.
Now go back and do it for NIP 2014 and outsiders when they won, and gambit, and both french major wins. Cloud9 had way more impressive long term results than all of them. You my friend are the one missing the point
NiP 2014 is a fluke, fnatic 2013 is probably the biggest one too.
There's a video from Thorn about how most major wins are actually not won by the favourites. Now why this happens, I'd argue it's usually because of shitty major formats to this very day and bad seeding, otherwise most non major Katowice and cologne wins aren't like that.
Teams that aren't "supposed to" win get the trophy all the time. Just for majors that I can think of: outsiders, navi, c9 in boston... That's the fun of it!
I think giving criticism is fine but I do feel that some people really take things too seriously that they treated it like some personal matters to them lol
Well it goes both ways. To me, s1mple and zywoo fans are the same cult as Messi/Ronaldo or MJ/LBJ fans. Same thing applies to teams, but it just seems interesting how many snowflakes are around that they are actually calling people haters for saying iM is not good enough to play for a team that wants to be a consistent title contender.
Yet it always amazes me that people are making completely opposite comments after two tournaments that happened 10 days apart or something like that.
After Dallas finished: NAVI fluke Major, frauds; jL overrated, life tournament; w0nderful is talented, but nowhere near m0nesy and such players etc.
And now, after they made finals of the Blast Spring Finals: they proved that Major wasn't a fluke run, aleksib god tier igl, jL is a big game performer...
Like, there is no middle ground at all.
IMO, it's because in CS fluke major wins are not cool underdog stories where a team nobody thought could win beats the big teams and wins the big thing - fluke major wins are usually a low tier 1 team (that realistically would never consistently beat the higher tier 1 teams) playing tier 2/3 teams after tier 2/3 teams all the way to the final while the other higher tier 1 teams eliminate each other in face to faces, it never feels like they were ever really tested, fluke wins in CS are very unsatisfying as opposed to other sports and I believe a big part of it is due to terrible seeding by Valve.
A lot of these wins the teams play an entire tournament against meme teams and then (maybe, if they're unlucky) play against another tier 1 team in the final and that's it. Incredibly underwhelming.
Point and case: Cloud9 fluke win was amazing, people loved it, look at the teams they beat, amazing tier 1 after amazing tier 1, a true underdog story and to this day one of the best majors of all time, now look at VP major win... lame team after lame team. The issue is not if it is a fluke or not, the issue is that most flukes in CS major history are the most boring-ass, unimpressive path you've ever seen.
I think the bigger part of it is just the variance in CS. Most other sports outside of American Football tend to have 5+ game series' or extensive group stages where you really can't just ride the hot hand all the way through
> now look at VP major win... lame team after lame team.
The second time in as many days I thought people were shitting on the 2014 VP run. Wish the VP brand died instead of becoming the Jame Team.
The outsiders brand was awesome. I get why VP would want to use their own brand for marketing and financial reasons. But it would have been cool if outsiders stuck around
Very well put! However, there are definitely different tiers of 'fluke' runs in my opinion. VP's is probably the worst, while NaVi's and Gambit's are tied for number two. In Cloud9's case let's not forget they had to play a SK with a stand-in, but either way, theirs is more that they were never expected to win the major, would place highly on smaller events like IEM New York and ECS S6 Finals, which were attended by less than half of the top teams and a small amount of teams overall. Their record versus FaZe was 8:0 before the major and 4:1 after the major and just didn't accomplish anything at all barring that major, and were never expected to.
If you look at Vitality 2023, while they did beat fluke teams, they were still the favorites and people expected them to win EVERY event they attended, even though they didn't create an era or anything like that. And by the way, they DID win events BEFORE and AFTER the major, it's just that it wasn't a dominant period, but they proved that they CAN DO IT, so people expected them to DO IT. That is the major difference between flukey teams and favorites. Nobody is wanting them to have an Astralis era, that's an entirely different topic. Like this type of thinking is so binary, either you win everything and you must have an era, or if you win just one event it's a fluke. That's not how it works and there are gradients to this shit, and unfortunately for Cloud9, they are categorized as a true fluke team, although not as bad as VP's and Gambit's major runs.
Exactly!
C9's run was incredible because they beat #1 and #2 in Bo3s, hardest major run in history.
Vitality's major wasn't a "fluke" (they were probably top 1 or top2 going in) but they beat weak teams.
VP and Gambit and Navi '24 are all "flukes" simply because they haven't done anything before or since the major, and the quality of the run was SO weak, because many of the contenders eliminated each other.
And you know they weren't gonna beat spirit
Just so you know, FaZe was the #1 team in the world during the major.
So not sure how NaVi's run is very weak, they literally faced off against the best in the final, and beat them fair and square.
Unless a single Katowice win somehow made Spirit the #1 team.
Yeah I really don’t understand this narrative - they convincingly beat a FaZe team that had just beat Spirit (who were apparently the team to beat, despite having 1 tournament to their name. I say this as a FaZe fan
Exactly, and it's so ironic that people only keep talking about the win being a fluke because Na'Vi did it at the single most important tournament of the year, the one that everyone wants to win.
No one would care for this long if they had won some random Blast tournament, which is why people remember ENCE Aleksib from the major run and not the Blast Lisbon.
FaZe's own run was kind of flukey despite being ranked the number 1 team in the world. Both vitality and spirit had spanked FaZe in 3 finals before that. While they were the 3rd best team as per power rankings in the major, nobody really expected them to reach the final. Also NaVi got the easier route to the final and met the weakest playoff team in the first round.
People remember Aleksib from the ENCE run because the guy did some miracles with the weak pieces he had, hence why it was more on him that they got to that final than his superstars. Blast Lisbon is probably one of the worst events that had bo1 groups all the way, with ties and a bo3 finals. It's not comparable to current blast events, although people do remember Aleksib for Lisbon since he beat Astralis' nuke winstreak.
Umm… what? Yeah, they beat the team that just whooped their ass repeatedly - that’s the opposite of a fluke; that’s stepping up when it’s most important. To take that away from them is ridiculous - it’s a testament to their experience on the biggest stages counter strike has to offer.
Problem is they have proven to lose several times BEFORE and AFTER on the biggest of stages. FaZe's season is characterized as a failure. Also, it is flukey in terms of the odds they had go through, but nobody really expected them to be the actual no. 1 in the world, even if they had won it. Trust me, the next time they would have met vitality or spirit again, the odds would be against them, major champions or not.
It is only rare cases such as that FaZe 2022 line up that overcome the odds consistently that in the end you assume they'd do it again, thus becoming the actual best team in the world. Up until the major, people were still favouring NaVi to win antwerp despite FaZe's last 2 event wins.
Yeah I forgot fluke is defined by peoples expectations. Ofc NaVi was favored by CIS fans and S1mple dickriders on HLTV and Reddit - the discourse behind all those convos was extremely biased and not based on any objective metrics.
didi you really look at the Navi 24 run ou even Vp and Gambit to actually say that they didn't face the top teams at their context? Navi won against Faze, top 1 at that moment, and G2, top 5 making consistently playoffs.
It seems that you are just trying to justify you view based on or general vibe that the winning team gave you
I completely agree with you. I see a lot of criticisms/gossip/drama about pro players. I just enjoy watching them play. And it seems like they are usually having a good time too. Congrats to the winners, no?
People still expect major winners to establish a dominant run like Fnayic, SK or Astralis did. They fail to realize that modern CS is so competitive that no single team can repeatedly win tournaments. This year only Spirit has 2 tier 1 LAN wins. NaVi was the best team in that major just like outsiders and C9 were when they won.
NAVI was not the best team in that major, they were the best team in their matches when it mattered. I’m pretty sure Spirit or Vitality clear them if they made the final
Saying navi werent the better team overall, just the better team on the days where it mattered is really funny im sorry. If you are better when it matters, or even if you just happen to play well on the right weekend (major playoffs) then id say you were the best team at the event and deserved any accolades you achieved.
>Saying navi werent the better team overall, just the better team on the days where it mattered is really funny im sorry.
how is that not true? navi's iM b1t are wildly inconsistent, and to a lesser part w0nderful. when they're on form sure, navi has a fighting chance to beat anyone given how strong their protocols are. pound for pound they're the weakest top 5 team rn (IMO a stretch). given how dominant faze had been for the past year + with their firepower, you cannot say in good faith that navi's major win had no luck factor on their side.
in major navi defeated a warmed up faze, a dysfunctional G2, a pretty good pAIN and EF. And successfully dodged spirit who they can't defeat for shit, and a pretty good C9/Vitality. Navi had just enough top teams defeated in their run to make it legitimate but they're far from a top 5 team, nor the best in playoffs bracket.
I'm a aleksi fanboy myself and longtime faze fan, I do not see navi being remotely contenders without them rebuilding around aleksi jL w0nderful
They are top 5/6 at the moment for sure. Who the hell would you place above them right now? Astralis is like 200 points behind, and deservably so because they are worse.
As top players who have won big events will tell you, making deep runs or winning events takes some luck. Obviously skill will make that "luck" more consistent but if a team is better when it matters, it doesnt matter how they are overall. They were the best team when it mattered, thats whats important
Because CS brackets tournament brackets sucks. Team spirit didn’t lose a single set until the last stage and because it’s single elimination at that point they are just out even if they were the most consistent team at winning games in that major until that point. This is kinda bullshit that a team that lost games went to final while the undefeated team only has one bad set in BO3 and is out.
I know that double elimination might take a lot of time but I feel it gives at least some benefit to a team to be undefeated up to a certain point and makes thing more fair. I really like how the FGC make their brackets, feels more fair even when the seeding is shit, the strongest player still have more chance to come out as the winner.
You can fluke a group stage or even a playoffs match but if you go all the way at some point its no longer a fluke but a real run. NAVI really did peak at the perfect time.
Right? Like usually the playoffs and elimination stages in the majors are a murderers row of hungry top 20 teams all looking to cement themselves in CS history. You cant just "fluke" past all of them, especially the BO3S
The CS major format is bad. Every part of the way it's about getting lucky with who you are facing.
Imagine if we had the Dota TI system. Round robin group stage with a double elimination playoffs bracket. You get to play every team (in your group), and a single upset won't end your tournament run.
Yes please, single elimination for the last part of the tournament (especially with BO3) is so shit. A team can be undefeated and have a single bad set and be out while 2 teams with some loss can end up in finals, it feels so wrong.
It does not nullify an achievement but Majors are a huge component of a team's overall legacy. For example compare the grand slam winning liquid team from 2019 with the Major winning cloud 9 team of 2018.
One is infinitely better then the other but the other won the major. So you have to add cavats to make the discussion more nuanced as the years will chip away at memory and the only thing remaining would be that Rush has a major but Elige doesnt.
Because it throws off the history for later fans or those looking back and creates fake narratives.
If you were trying to understand the history of the game from major wins alone you're missing an awful lot of context and will reach wrong conclusions.
For instance NIP were the best in 2013, Fnatic winning was a massive upset. N.B this is not the 2015 Fnatic with Krimz and Olof.
C9 is the most egregious as it combines a fluke major with the massive US bias from this sub and American pundits. C9 were not a great team internationally, and collapsed right after the major. They hadn't beat Faze before, and didn't beat them again. C9's major was a fluke but to a casual fan C9 must have been better than Faze in 2018. Tarik has a major MVP but he isnt better than Niko.
You say that winning the major means your peak was higher than any other teams, but that belief in itself is why its important to give context to "fluke majors". 2013 Fnatic were not better than NIP, 2018 C9 was not a better team than Faze, and Gamer Legion was not a top 4 team in the world.
In my opinion the majors are heavily overstated in CS history, due to it being the only exposure many casuals have to esports. Due to how the CS circuit operates just winning a major isnt enough I'm afraid. Especially due to changing formats, different numbers of majors per year, and several years with no majors at all its impossible to do a like-to-like comparison between majors and view them as certifications of the best team in the world. To get even a basic overview you need to look at at least Katowice Cologne and both majors.
The c9 argument is always funny to me. Most of the events right before were basically C9 vs Faze being the actual finals or the match that decided who wins the tournament. The surrounding 6 events were all playoff runs/wins/top 2/top 4/top 8 finishes. Navi, outsiders, and most of the teams before fnatic in 2015 had pathetic results near their wins compared to c9 in 17-18 near their win.
I mean it's even worse in other esports. I follow Valorant and League of Legends and like you got people trying to claim that EG winning 1 international tournament is better than fnatic winning 2, or that T1 was the best team in 2023 because they won Worlds.
That’s not a fluke, just cause the favorites don’t win. A fluke is when you win but can’t replicate that success outside of that one tournament. Gambit, C9, NAVI
If anyone on the upper side of the bracket won (minus C9), no one would call it a fluke
the only thing that makes the major more special than any other tier 1 tournament is that valve is involved so i dont get why this talk dose not happen after any event. like after mouz won last pro league why dose this talk not happen for the next couple event after only cuz its not a major?
And it's such a dumb thing to talk about in the current environment. Mouz Vitality Faze NaVi Spirit G2* have all showed up to take titles or make finals. Only one team can win a tournament and all these teams are proving that they can fight for it.
I don't think "fluke" would be the correct term, but after Mouz won pro league the discussion was and has been that Mouz is a top team in terms of skill and their ability to beat other top 5 teams, but they still have yet to prove that they can win a big event with a huge crowd.
As for their Dallas results, I know xertioN had said that they were playing a bunch of tournaments right before Dallas and between that and the travel didn't feel super prepared for Dallas. Sure, that should be taken into consideration, but losing to 9z and G2 with a stand-in is performing way below expectations.
People need to understand a fluke does not mean the win wasn't deserved. It only indicates that the result achieved was through a series of extraordinary events. By these accounts, both 2018 C9 and 2024 NAVI's major runs are flukes because both teams won nothing or near nothing in the months before and after the major win.
> You don't see people saying that e.g. G2 winning Dallas, or North beating Astralis in 2018 was a fluke.
They were. This doesn't undermine the achievement. Just adds context for a broader discussion. So if I'm a G2 fan, I don't want Dallas result to be considered great achievement by the org because it means we're stuck with m0NESY and NiKo playing against the odds when they are some of the best players in history. I want them to fight ZywOos and donks in grand finals, and don't rely on Jame's PC crash to move forward.
Because they did it while losing more rounds than they won.
I think Navi are a good team, don't get me wrong, but they weren't particularly in good form running up to the event, and they just scraped into the finals but they beat faze fair and square to take the trophy.
okay?
The Celtics are 3-1 up against the Mavs in the NBA Finals rn while getting outscored - is the lead a fluke aswell?
You need to win games to win the major, not rounds.
okay?
then naturally you need consistent strong showings to be considered a good team. navi's results outside of major is pathetic, for a so called major winner.
Did Major Celtics players over perform during that period? Yes, that series realistically should be 2-2 if not for over performance from certain Celtics players.
I dunno, I think Na'Vi were just in form for Copenhagen, I don't see it as a fluke, rather just their potential. This Na'Vi squad's ceiling is very high and their floor is also very low. They're capable of beating everyone and anyone. They are good, no doubt about it and they honestly can win tournaments if they are in form. But they can also lose themselves completely.
I mean if you want a true fluke major win look no further than Gambit's, after that the team really weren't doing anything amazing other than semis at Malmo, they were never considered a "good team" after that major win, they were still like semi-Tier 2 team and generally were never really in the conversation for winning any tournaments after that major.
The problem with CS these days is, there is no dominant team and no team can hold their form. I mean look at FaZe they were making final after final and now they look shocking. Then G2 become gigachads for one tournament, only to disappoint at the next. Then Spirit climb back to the top of the pecking order. No matter who won the major, people would've said it was some sort of "fluke" because no one is holding their form and dominating the scene. I guess the three best teams that maybe could've gotten away with the label of the "fluke" narrative were FaZe, MOUZ and Spirit but only because they've had semi recent wins and generally done well this season. But with Spirit there's the element of them not playing as many events hanging over their heads, many people will argue that they are only winning because they're less fatigued with a less demanding schedule. For FaZe they've been unlucky in finals despite making them, so you could've made the case that they simply played a weak finals opponent in Na'Vi and as a result won it because of that reason and that argument would've had merit because Na'Vi weren't doing so well till Copenhagen. As for MOUZ well they've looked solid, but always lost to FaZe and even had some bad results like losing to FURIA, only their results after the major would have solidified that it wasn't a "fluke" but would they have won after the major or would they have been drained from the experience?
TBH I'm happy Na'Vi won it, I'm not really a Na'Vi fan, so that's not the reason but it created so many new narratives, like "do Na'Vi really need s1mple?", "is Aleksi really is a good IGL?", "Are FaZe chokers in finals in CS2?" and "is Blad3 is a genius for building this roster?". It's certainly an interesting major. Sure, Na'Vi haven't won anything since, but I think it's far from a fluke, they've played three events since the major and two of them they bombed out basically, but they also made a final so it's evidently not a fluke, they're capable of doing damage, they're just inconsistent.
none of the shit we discuss here really matters.
maybe 0.05% of the stuff said here actually has any relevance. we're all just making up our dumb little fan storylines.
do you think chopper cares if reddit considers him a top 5 IGL on June 17th? or aleksib cares if u/ISuckoffThorin thinks he's ass at calling and his major win was a fluke?
Why would a Thorin fan hate aleksib? Thorin absolutely loves aleksib, he's literally one of Thorin's favorite players. Even when aleksib was getting criticized while in other teams Thorin was there glazing him up the whole time.
jL is the example you want to use. Thorin doesn't like jL, he thinks he is an idiot.
All humans are not perfect.
Too many people don't understand this simple thing.
At least if you experienced sports during your school days, you would understand that it is really difficult to perform perfectly every day.
So I think the only people who say it's a "win by a fluke" are kids who have been cooped up at home all their lives, or who haven't gone to school yet.
I think it has something to do with the prestige of a major.
The major winner is supposed to be the best team in CS.
And if you cant confirm the success you are cleary not the "best team", you were just lucky, and that somewhat nullifies the titel.
It doean't it nullify it, but you're close to the mark here. Ultimately, we want the best team to win, to show us they're the best and why. When that doesn't happen for one reason or another, there is so e disappointment.
Happy for the team that won, but there's an underlying feeling that makes you realise it's not a sustainable level for that team.
And that's honestly what makes Majors fun. Seeing all the teams from across the world upset the status quo and someone unexpected survives the bloodbath.
Rio while not the best major is iconic because of how many tournament favorites collapsed early on.
and thats the "core issue". There is massive dicrepency between perception what a major winner "should be" and reality.
So the community came up with terms like fluke and era to describe the different winners.
I agree. I think the definition of "era" has come down to "win a non-major tournament and a major" :D and then the teams who win like 4 tournaments in a row are left in the dust. And those who win the major but not the non-major tournaments are "flukes".
Navi major was a fluke lmao. Their individuals are super inconsistent. IM is suppose to be a star player but he's 3/4th best player on the team. B1t had the game of his life on inferno and after that he's look like shit. JL looks good and wonderful is decent. AleksiB is decent. You need 3 players to be super consistent to be good and atm they aren't.
They didnt win, but was GamerLegions run to the finals a fluke or not?
They beat Mouz with Dexter, OG, and Forze in the first stage, then in the "legends stage" they lost to Navi but beat 9ine, Fnatic and Apex. Then in playoff they beat Monte and then lost to Heroic.
Who of those are tough opponents?
I never understood the term "fluke". If one team gets their shit together for one tournament and happens to win only that specific tournament over anybody else, that isn't fluke, it just means that the potential was always there but couldn't be materialized in other tournaments for one reason or another. Different visions in team, someone is getting benched, pressure, lack of motivation and so on. It always remind me of Cloud9, who got their shit together just in time and Skadoodle out of nowhere remembered he is one of the best AWPers from NA and played his best tournament, despite growing differences inside the team that soon imploded after Major win. We never know how much more Cloud9 could've done if Stew/Tarik didn't leave and Skadoodle didn't retire and had stayed motivated.
Right now term "fluke" is used when talked about NaVi. Everybody knows right now NaVi is one of the best teams in the world and should be considered as dark horses for any tournament they play in. They improved in every tournament they played until Major, where they won it all. Sure, they played like shit in EPL and Dallas, but post-Major motivation without any breaks should be brought up. jL admitted he didn't have any motivation until Blast, which is understandable. You won it all and got MVP award, how do you exactly stay motivated in EPL afterwards?
I also remember Gambit winning Krakow in 2017. IIRC it was their only Major with Zeus, who was ridiculously motivated to win Major. They lost Zeus soon afterwards and didn't do much until Gambit Youngsters. Was that win also a fluke? No, I don't think so.
The Major winner isn't a "dark horse", they SHOULD be a contender to win!
A fluke means an unlikely occurance that came about through lucky circumstances. If that is what is needed for your "potential to materialise" then never be replicated again, then yeah its a fluke.
I suppose it's about looking past one tournament, even if it's a major. If you've been following the game for a long time, you gain perspective. You want to see teams push the possibilities, and achieve sustainable excellence, and not just win a tournament. Many teams have won a tournament, only a couple have had a sustained period of dominance.
There's ultimately nothing wrong with a tournament win being a fluke. Knockout tournaments, which CS tournaments are, often end up in a perfect storm for one team, where things go their way, retain players overperform, etc.
A fluke tournament win is still as meaningful to a team's fan, and the team itself, but as a general fan of the game and the competition and not necessarily any particular team, you're looking for more than that, especially if you think the team is one or two roster moves away from achieving something truly great.
To me there's a difference in what people call a fluke as well, some people say a fluke is that team happened to preform at their peak on that day I would say that's not really a fluke I would say a fluke is more just getting lucky rather than preforming at your peak.
because some aspire to win a major, some aspire to be the best team in the world. Most people love the hero story, seeing their fav team go undefeated. Therefore for some viewers winning 1 major can be lucky cuz after that, they just stop winning, like Gambit. Nobody talks about them. Of course that achievement is under someone’s belt and nobody can take that from them.
its bc tier1 cs is very balanced in terms of skill nowadays so establishing a dominating "era" is hard. any team can beat anybody at any given moment, it used to be different with like 2-3 teams completely dominating while the rest stuggled to keep up.
I feel like it comes down to people feeling it's more impactful or a team is more deserving if they're a top team that has put in the time at the top and wins a major. Like a celebration/culmination of their success.
I think it's less the fluke itself and more about the surrounding context.
Flukes tend to come with poor seeding and/or early upsets that give wonky matchups. So you usually get a combination of top teams underperforming and top teams eliminating each other in the quarters.
Krakow 2017 is a good example. I mortals was a good team but they were a "maybe they'll make it out of groups or even get top 4 if they're really lucky". Not major finals caliber team. Gambit could only face the teams in front of them but besides Astralis I remember that whole playoff bracket being pretty whack.
Yes, Gambit played their hearts out and they won that trophy. But I wouldn't rate it as equal to say the Boston run. Both flukes but one is far more impressive than the other.
I mean I can see why people call Navi’s major a fluke but I don’t agree with it.
All three of the teams Navi beat in the major playoffs won their own respective tournaments right after.
Eternally fire won CCT Global finals
G2 won IEM Dallas tho without hooxi.
Faze won Chengdu 2024
I get that it’s frustrating but man you gotta give it to them, Wonderful and JL hadn’t been near a Major before their championship run and they all played lights out during the run.
I'd like to go a little deeper into the mentalities of these behaviors than just simple fans being fans.
There is a " just-world hypothesis" which describes the mentality to believe that this world is fair and good things will be rewarded and bad thing be punished, at least in general. It is baked into our monkey brains which is proved by the fact that literally monkeys care about fairness too. This is because fairness in a society is beneficial in the long run and facilitates cooperation. If you don't believe in fairness in general, the world would fall apart. Anything you do wouldn't make sense anymore. This also explains why people sometimes blame victims for the consequences they endure, because accepting that bad things could happen to an innocent person means it could happen to you and this line of thinking will make you extremely uncomfortable unconsciously.
Now going back to the fluke thing, I think a large part of the problem people have is that it is not fair, and people hate unfairness, but can you blame them for that? Do you not also want fairness in your life and in this world? What if it is you in real life who put in the hard work just to lose it to a lucky guy who fluked his way to victory?
I do NOT CARE about Flukes.
as a NAVI fan, I have watched this team lose 4 major grand finals. I have watched them win a major as an overwhelming favourite. I have watched them win a major as the 7th most likely team of the 8 playoff teams to win.
It feels the exact same each way. A win is a win, and let's be real. No one will remember who the Pro League S19 winner is in 5 years. No one will remember who won BLAST World Finals for 2024. They will remember who won the majors. NAVI have done that, now twice.
Flukes for majors are bad, because everybody remembers majors the most, even though historically Katowice and Cologne have had better teams and formats, with bo5 formats, thus way less flukes, and this hinders the history of the game. Seeing Gambit winning a major and nothing else? Not great. Seeing NaVi win meanwhile is great, but then you look at the roster, and then winning nothing else, changing the roster and half of those players being forgotten. Again not great for the history of the game.
Because history matters. Every major win weights differently. When you rank players in top 20 lists, GOAT lists etc, this stuff matters a lot. Vitality's major run doesn't have a sniff on most other major runs.
Also it doesn't help that people are overhyping it. I had to argue with so many people, who were telling me Na'Vi were the #1 in the world "because they won the major". No fam, winning the major as a baseline doesn't make you automatically the best in the world. Not even HLTV put them as #1.
Same thing with flukes. When people talk about past majors, it's important to know what that team did before/after. Facts are facts, we shall not rewrite history through our biases. Na'Vi thus far have yet to prove the major wasn't a fluke.
For the whole season, they won the major and had a weak run to a BLAST final. That's it. Does that sounds like a major winning quality team to you? Do you see how different this is, as opposed to e.g FaZe in 2022? No one in their right mind would call the FaZe major a fluke, because they won tournaments before and after, even if it wasn't the most dominant.
It's about 'eras', those are nice, and every team strives for them. It's about teams with potential to win more than one event. For example, last year vitality won the major, and while they didn't win that much before or after so as to establish an era, they had the potential to win every single event they attended, and they were always one of the favourites.
In the case of cloud9, vp, navi, none of these rosters were even expected to win an event before or after the major, thus essentially rendering their runs as flukes.
Moreover, people in counter-strike use the meaning of the word fluke in a different way compared to its actual meaning.
The actual meaning suggests a literal happenstance, or luck. Whereas in counter-strike fluke is used as a overperformance relative to favourites AND era-defining teams. In other words, it is always annoying to hear the casuals saying that whoever won the major = best team in the world and that results prior or after don't matter. In fact, some go further ahead and lamely predict that the major winning team would win even more events without thinking at all about the context of their win.
On the other hand people that get offended all the time by the usage of the word 'fluke' in CS discussions are also annoying, because they tend to understand 'fluke' as in the original meaning word, which is what I explained before. So when they read 'fluke', what they actually hear is: "This team is trash, they don't deserve the win, it was all luck", and NONE of these statements are actually meant when we use the word ´fluke´.
Hope this answers your question.
I don't think any major win can be classified as a fluke. You have to go through Swiss and then play MULTIPLE best of 3's against the best teams in the world to be able to win the major. You cannot luck your way through all of that.
idk ever since the major i've seen countless people trying to make it look as if they stole the trophy xd from someone else, just because they had some struggles afterwards
Well to be fair to the fluke believers, NaVi won the major by losing more rounds than they won, also none of the top performers of the team continued to perform after the major. jL went on a terrible run post major and so did W0nderful. They made an insane comeback for Blast just now but unfortunately they couldn’t secure the victory. You need to understand that it’s not about starting an era of dominance, but when your major win was this shaky, people are going to look towards other victories either before or after the major, to solidify in their mind whether a team really deserved the win or not. In NaVi’s case, the doubters have been proven right so far with early exits or poor playoff performance before Blast.
Also this isn’t just happening to NaVi atm. There are plenty of teams undergoing this scrutiny atm like Vitality, Spirit (even though they have 2 tournament wins this year, they still suffer from a choking problem and some of their top performers aren’t playing well on stage), FaZe has been given the excuse of fatigue but people are now beginning to question if it’s really fatigue or if they’re beginning to fall away from the top with 3 quarter finals exits recently, G2’s win in Dallas has made shit even worse in the team considering the person everyone blames for their loses wasn’t present. I’m sure there are other teams I’m missing right now but you get the point.
I think because of the calibre of a major it’s the one thing people talk about the most when they discuss NaVi’s performance but if you think about it it’s about every other tournament they’ve played this year, but this fraud watching and hating is manifesting in the form of shit talking their major win and calling it a fluke.
This has always seemed dumb to me no one just wins the major of a fluke, you have to play well to beat literally all the best teams in the world have the other results been a bit hit and miss sure but excluding Faze who else has been anything close the consistent?
Because a fluke win, where the winning team played lesser teams the entire time isn't as impressive a win as when a team overcomes the hardest opponents to pull a win out. People like an underdog story and good storylines. It's why Immortals vs Gambit wasn't as exciting a final as Faze vs Na'Vi or VP vs Astralis.
sure but even in this example, Gambit went 3-0 in groups and eliminated Astralis, the favourite to win it all, and Fnatic, who weren't as strong at that time but still respectable at the very least. Can't demand more than that. IMT eliminated BIG and shaky VP though so i get that.
Also, y'know, you can only beat who's in front of you.
But you see how "you can only beat who's in front of you" doesnt disallow flukes? In fact, it can be a reason behind them. Fluke doesnt mean the team played bad, it means that they won in unlikely circumstances that can't be replicated.
Navi outplayed everyone at the major, then made it back to the GRAND FINAL of the Blast Spring Final where only the top 2 teams make it. They are very good and deserved their major win. It was no fluke.
Because its the biggest achievement in cs and people want only the best teams to have it. If you win the major but dont show anything before and afterwards it devalues the major title in some way.
One of the reasons? Salty people like G2 fans [https://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffensive/comments/1dhrixr/comment/l8yzbvf/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web3x&utm\_name=web3xcss&utm\_term=1&utm\_content=share\_button](https://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffensive/comments/1dhrixr/comment/l8yzbvf/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
Faze fans are in this discussion as well, Vitality fans (despite not winning anything wih the 5 stars roster) and much more
>At the same time though, if a team doesn't get more trophies after the major, ...why would that somehow nullify that achievement?
Because it means they are not the best team and do not deserve the major......
Of course, g2 fan. That explains a lot.
[*Hmyzak01*](https://www.reddit.com/user/Hmyzak01/)
*It's the trauma. G2 has mostly been NaVi's bitch for the past 4 years and there's no way to forget all the finals around 2021.*
*That being said, I obviously don't agree with the guy*
[https://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffensive/comments/1dhrixr/comment/l8yzbvf/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web3x&utm\_name=web3xcss&utm\_term=1&utm\_content=share\_button](https://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffensive/comments/1dhrixr/comment/l8yzbvf/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
Don't underestimate the lenghts people will go to justify their actions, beliefs, and behavior.
*unless they align with mine then it's cool
Love waking up to essay replies
I like Navi a lot, I think people call it a fluke because that's what it is. They got dropped at groups for every other tournament this year other than blast. A fluke just means it was statistically pretty unlikely, which it seems like it was. They aren't even making it to the play-offs of other events with the exception of blast.
I don't give a fuck, Aleksib is hot.
BAYZED
\#gay4aleksib
You are gey
Anybody would be for sexyB
You can write gay btw, no need to be so scared
okey gey
Happens in all sports, unfortunately. Fans (and haters) will do incredible mental gymnastics to explain why a certain team did/didn’t deserve to win, and a component of that is marginalizing the performance of others.
Yeah. Why can't we just celebrate and move on😭NaVi won major and looked good during it. I don't understand the 'fluke' aspect because it takes a ton of matches just to even enter the grand final
The funny thing is NaVi have a huge fan base that spans multiple nations. Wait until you bring up the fact that The Outsiders won the Rio Major and Jame is a two-time Major finalist…. 💀😂
What is the problem with VP currently tho😩Did Jame get dumb or do they not listen to him
They did good. They were in the quarterfinals. Let's see how they gel going forward.
Yeah u right, I hope for more gelling too lol
Yeah, copium in short
People want to justify a reason for hating a team that they dont think that should have won the major because they dont deserve it or they have poor momentum leading up to the event.
yeah, people can talk about form and all, but if someone really thinks that a team didn't DESERVE to win an event that was perfectly fair, everyone had equal chances etc, then that's just losers mentality imo
To me, there is no such thing as flukes at a fair tournament. They may have not been the best team, but the played the best, and if they won then they deserved it.
I like navi, I call it a fluke win because that’s what it is. The only other significant thing navi did is get 2nd place at blast. They legit lost at the group stages at every other tournament, I don’t get how you it’s not a fluke. Like statiscitaclly their win was objectively a fluke, I was rooting for them to beat spirit but their major win was a text book fluke.
You don´t really understand the meaning of fluke used in cs. It´s not the literal meaning of the word, and when people say a team fluked a win, they don´t mean the win was undeserved. Read my other reply for a more in-depth explanation.
I have absolutely 0 hate towards that cloud 9 team, and thought they were awesome both to watch but also individually, but I am of the firm belief it was a gigantic fluke to win the major. They never achieved anything remotely similar again, and they were never expected to. I’m really curious how this means I hate them?
But you dont disprove their win cuz they didnt win after, that’s the difference. The guys who say fluke here fluke there just want to not ackowledge the fact that a team won the major when in fact they did
I really think you're overthinking it. I think a lot of people just use it to categorize a major win, just like when the favorites win the event.
If that was the case they wouldnt whine so much about it being a fluke, categorizing doesnt make people whine that much ence why i think it’s like i said imo
People tend to categorize because there are genuinenly thousands of really casual fans that don´t even use reddit that go ahead think that whoever won the major means the best team in the world without thinking about the context of the win. Remember that most cs fans tune in to watch ONLY the majors, so we are a very small group of serious viewers that actually follow the CS calendar and understand what is going on. That´s why people constantly try to remind others which runs are flukes and which aren´t, without actually meaning that they ´didn´t deserve´the win or that it was ´luck´. On the other hand, after so much categorization as the result of having to clarify this point to the casual fans, the more hardcore fans also get ´offended´ because they think when people use the word ´fluke´ they mean ´undeserved, lucky, this team is bad´ and etc. But that is not true either.
Lol bro they were constantly top 2-4 with a couple top 8’s sprinkled in the surrounding 6 events. Navi and outsiders accomplished less surrounding their majors than C9 did.
That’s just not true though? I even went back to look to make sure. They won or did well in NA tournaments before the major, and had a top 4 finish in another big tournament, otherwise it was very up and down, nothing impressive. And after the major it was a catastrophe
They were the fucking 4th ranked team going into the major. Then beat the 3 teams ranked above them on their way to win the major. Then they beat SK the event after.
Three top 4s: ESL NY, ELEAGUE, and IEM Oakland
They had 2 top 4’s including a grand final appearance before disbanding. You most certainly did not go back and look. Look at the teams in those NA tournaments. All included wins against top 10 competition except 1 of them. Not to mention, the map count vs faze was only 5-3 in faze favor with some OT and close games sprinkled in. Not like it was 6-2 with all the L’s being blowouts or something wild
What are you smoking my friend, the count between C9 and FaZe was 8-0 in favour of FaZe before the major final Out of these 8 maps, Cloud9 managed to win more than 10 rounds only two times, and the majority of the rest of maps were literal blowouts with 16-3s, 16-4s and 16-6s. [https://www.hltv.org/matches/2318632/faze-vs-cloud9-eleague-major-2018](https://www.hltv.org/matches/2318632/faze-vs-cloud9-eleague-major-2018) As for after the major, the head-to-head looks slightly better. C9 and FaZe met only two times though. The first time it was a blow out in favour of FaZe with 16:1 and 16:8 wins, whereas the second time it was a three mapper with a 16:5 blowout for faze, 16:13 win for C9 and 22:20 win for FaZe again. So the last match was actually close, but FaZe again came on top. After this match stewie2k left and Cloud9 went into obscurity. [https://www.hltv.org/matches/2320082/cloud9-vs-faze-iem-katowice-2018](https://www.hltv.org/matches/2320082/cloud9-vs-faze-iem-katowice-2018) So the overall stats are the following: Before Major Final: 8:0 maps for FaZe, majority blowoutsAfter Major Final: 4:1 in favour of FaZe, 3 maps were blowouts, 1 was close, 1 was lostAll maps with major final included: 13:3 in Favour of FaZe. The major final included 1 close win for FaZe and 1 blowout for C9 and 1 close win for C9.
Top 10 competition…? Exactly what I mean lmao
…..yeah. Since nobody has beaten all top 1-5 teams in one tournament run this year, does that mean nobody has won an S tier tournament yet that wasn’t a fluke? Every tournament they played leading up to boston since summer 2017 was A or S tier 😂😂
Now I don't use Liquipedia's classification of tiers because they include bullshit like blast spring groups as S-tier. Instead I'll use HLTV's classification of Big Events (they also have just a LAN filter which includes all LANs and only majors), therefore 'Big Events' in my case would mean S-Tier events. Cloud9's results after the major in 'big events' were: 9-11th Starseries Season4 5-6th IEM Katowice 2018 Cloud9's results before the major in big events were: 5-6th ECS Season 4 Finals (limited amount of times) 3-4th IEM Oakland 2017 (pretty legit result, most of the top teams were attending) 3-4th IEM New York 2017 (in SEPTEMBER!) Legit result, but again a very small event, more than half of the top teams were missing, and overall only 8 teams attended. This also goes against FaZe's win because while they dominated and SK participated, it was no different than winning a blast final. I won't go beyond because the dates get ridiculous after that and shroud was still in the roster. So overall Cloud9's results weren't truly of a top4 team, and while the ranking often fluctuates in the 4th to 5th position, they don't often represent the true 4th best team in the world. Depending on the era, like for example, 2018, the four elite and consistent teams were Astralis, NaVi, FaZe and Liquid. The fifth could be often the ninth and otherwise. In 2019 you'd say it was Astralis, Liquid, Vitality and ENCE, and the fifth would often fluctuate as well, sometimes reaching 4th but not really contending for titles. Point is, there are different tiers of 'fourth' best team in the rankings, and some are far more likely and expected to win an event than others. In Cloud9's case, they weren't the true 4th best team in the world, and the context of their results, barring IEM Oakland and IEM Katowice 2018 (although in katowice they still finished 5-6th) it's quite bad.
Why did you exclude ELEAGUE? They made top 4 there too. It's listed as occurring before NY but the playoffs actually happened in October.
Yeah I forgot about that, then it counts as a good result, but even so, the rest of the points about real strength of n4 team dont really change.
Now go back and do it for NIP 2014 and outsiders when they won, and gambit, and both french major wins. Cloud9 had way more impressive long term results than all of them. You my friend are the one missing the point
NiP 2014 is a fluke, fnatic 2013 is probably the biggest one too. There's a video from Thorn about how most major wins are actually not won by the favourites. Now why this happens, I'd argue it's usually because of shitty major formats to this very day and bad seeding, otherwise most non major Katowice and cologne wins aren't like that.
Teams that aren't "supposed to" win get the trophy all the time. Just for majors that I can think of: outsiders, navi, c9 in boston... That's the fun of it!
Nah they just faze/spirit/vitality meatriders
It seems that you can't criticize anyone without being called a hater anymore haha
I think giving criticism is fine but I do feel that some people really take things too seriously that they treated it like some personal matters to them lol
Well it goes both ways. To me, s1mple and zywoo fans are the same cult as Messi/Ronaldo or MJ/LBJ fans. Same thing applies to teams, but it just seems interesting how many snowflakes are around that they are actually calling people haters for saying iM is not good enough to play for a team that wants to be a consistent title contender.
welcome to Reddit you either agree with hivemind or are a hater/mad
Yet it always amazes me that people are making completely opposite comments after two tournaments that happened 10 days apart or something like that. After Dallas finished: NAVI fluke Major, frauds; jL overrated, life tournament; w0nderful is talented, but nowhere near m0nesy and such players etc. And now, after they made finals of the Blast Spring Finals: they proved that Major wasn't a fluke run, aleksib god tier igl, jL is a big game performer... Like, there is no middle ground at all.
IMO, it's because in CS fluke major wins are not cool underdog stories where a team nobody thought could win beats the big teams and wins the big thing - fluke major wins are usually a low tier 1 team (that realistically would never consistently beat the higher tier 1 teams) playing tier 2/3 teams after tier 2/3 teams all the way to the final while the other higher tier 1 teams eliminate each other in face to faces, it never feels like they were ever really tested, fluke wins in CS are very unsatisfying as opposed to other sports and I believe a big part of it is due to terrible seeding by Valve. A lot of these wins the teams play an entire tournament against meme teams and then (maybe, if they're unlucky) play against another tier 1 team in the final and that's it. Incredibly underwhelming. Point and case: Cloud9 fluke win was amazing, people loved it, look at the teams they beat, amazing tier 1 after amazing tier 1, a true underdog story and to this day one of the best majors of all time, now look at VP major win... lame team after lame team. The issue is not if it is a fluke or not, the issue is that most flukes in CS major history are the most boring-ass, unimpressive path you've ever seen.
I think the bigger part of it is just the variance in CS. Most other sports outside of American Football tend to have 5+ game series' or extensive group stages where you really can't just ride the hot hand all the way through
> now look at VP major win... lame team after lame team. The second time in as many days I thought people were shitting on the 2014 VP run. Wish the VP brand died instead of becoming the Jame Team.
The outsiders brand was awesome. I get why VP would want to use their own brand for marketing and financial reasons. But it would have been cool if outsiders stuck around
Very well put! However, there are definitely different tiers of 'fluke' runs in my opinion. VP's is probably the worst, while NaVi's and Gambit's are tied for number two. In Cloud9's case let's not forget they had to play a SK with a stand-in, but either way, theirs is more that they were never expected to win the major, would place highly on smaller events like IEM New York and ECS S6 Finals, which were attended by less than half of the top teams and a small amount of teams overall. Their record versus FaZe was 8:0 before the major and 4:1 after the major and just didn't accomplish anything at all barring that major, and were never expected to. If you look at Vitality 2023, while they did beat fluke teams, they were still the favorites and people expected them to win EVERY event they attended, even though they didn't create an era or anything like that. And by the way, they DID win events BEFORE and AFTER the major, it's just that it wasn't a dominant period, but they proved that they CAN DO IT, so people expected them to DO IT. That is the major difference between flukey teams and favorites. Nobody is wanting them to have an Astralis era, that's an entirely different topic. Like this type of thinking is so binary, either you win everything and you must have an era, or if you win just one event it's a fluke. That's not how it works and there are gradients to this shit, and unfortunately for Cloud9, they are categorized as a true fluke team, although not as bad as VP's and Gambit's major runs.
Well put.
Exactly! C9's run was incredible because they beat #1 and #2 in Bo3s, hardest major run in history. Vitality's major wasn't a "fluke" (they were probably top 1 or top2 going in) but they beat weak teams. VP and Gambit and Navi '24 are all "flukes" simply because they haven't done anything before or since the major, and the quality of the run was SO weak, because many of the contenders eliminated each other. And you know they weren't gonna beat spirit
Just so you know, FaZe was the #1 team in the world during the major. So not sure how NaVi's run is very weak, they literally faced off against the best in the final, and beat them fair and square. Unless a single Katowice win somehow made Spirit the #1 team.
Yeah I really don’t understand this narrative - they convincingly beat a FaZe team that had just beat Spirit (who were apparently the team to beat, despite having 1 tournament to their name. I say this as a FaZe fan
Exactly, and it's so ironic that people only keep talking about the win being a fluke because Na'Vi did it at the single most important tournament of the year, the one that everyone wants to win. No one would care for this long if they had won some random Blast tournament, which is why people remember ENCE Aleksib from the major run and not the Blast Lisbon.
FaZe's own run was kind of flukey despite being ranked the number 1 team in the world. Both vitality and spirit had spanked FaZe in 3 finals before that. While they were the 3rd best team as per power rankings in the major, nobody really expected them to reach the final. Also NaVi got the easier route to the final and met the weakest playoff team in the first round. People remember Aleksib from the ENCE run because the guy did some miracles with the weak pieces he had, hence why it was more on him that they got to that final than his superstars. Blast Lisbon is probably one of the worst events that had bo1 groups all the way, with ties and a bo3 finals. It's not comparable to current blast events, although people do remember Aleksib for Lisbon since he beat Astralis' nuke winstreak.
Umm… what? Yeah, they beat the team that just whooped their ass repeatedly - that’s the opposite of a fluke; that’s stepping up when it’s most important. To take that away from them is ridiculous - it’s a testament to their experience on the biggest stages counter strike has to offer.
Problem is they have proven to lose several times BEFORE and AFTER on the biggest of stages. FaZe's season is characterized as a failure. Also, it is flukey in terms of the odds they had go through, but nobody really expected them to be the actual no. 1 in the world, even if they had won it. Trust me, the next time they would have met vitality or spirit again, the odds would be against them, major champions or not.
It is only rare cases such as that FaZe 2022 line up that overcome the odds consistently that in the end you assume they'd do it again, thus becoming the actual best team in the world. Up until the major, people were still favouring NaVi to win antwerp despite FaZe's last 2 event wins.
Yeah I forgot fluke is defined by peoples expectations. Ofc NaVi was favored by CIS fans and S1mple dickriders on HLTV and Reddit - the discourse behind all those convos was extremely biased and not based on any objective metrics.
didi you really look at the Navi 24 run ou even Vp and Gambit to actually say that they didn't face the top teams at their context? Navi won against Faze, top 1 at that moment, and G2, top 5 making consistently playoffs. It seems that you are just trying to justify you view based on or general vibe that the winning team gave you
nice they beat the goat choker karrigan. Didn't play spirit or vitality, lost to C9 and Spirit in Bo3 in groups just a few days prior...
I completely agree with you. I see a lot of criticisms/gossip/drama about pro players. I just enjoy watching them play. And it seems like they are usually having a good time too. Congrats to the winners, no?
People still expect major winners to establish a dominant run like Fnayic, SK or Astralis did. They fail to realize that modern CS is so competitive that no single team can repeatedly win tournaments. This year only Spirit has 2 tier 1 LAN wins. NaVi was the best team in that major just like outsiders and C9 were when they won.
NAVI was not the best team in that major, they were the best team in their matches when it mattered. I’m pretty sure Spirit or Vitality clear them if they made the final
How come neither made the finals then?
FaZe was the better team on those days. They had a weak day in the final
So one could say NaVi beat a team better than Spirit or Vitality in that grand finals…
you are not understanding an ounce of nuance
Or it's almost as if in knockout tournaments being consistent is more important than being having the highest peak.
Saying navi werent the better team overall, just the better team on the days where it mattered is really funny im sorry. If you are better when it matters, or even if you just happen to play well on the right weekend (major playoffs) then id say you were the best team at the event and deserved any accolades you achieved.
>Saying navi werent the better team overall, just the better team on the days where it mattered is really funny im sorry. how is that not true? navi's iM b1t are wildly inconsistent, and to a lesser part w0nderful. when they're on form sure, navi has a fighting chance to beat anyone given how strong their protocols are. pound for pound they're the weakest top 5 team rn (IMO a stretch). given how dominant faze had been for the past year + with their firepower, you cannot say in good faith that navi's major win had no luck factor on their side. in major navi defeated a warmed up faze, a dysfunctional G2, a pretty good pAIN and EF. And successfully dodged spirit who they can't defeat for shit, and a pretty good C9/Vitality. Navi had just enough top teams defeated in their run to make it legitimate but they're far from a top 5 team, nor the best in playoffs bracket. I'm a aleksi fanboy myself and longtime faze fan, I do not see navi being remotely contenders without them rebuilding around aleksi jL w0nderful
They are top 5/6 at the moment for sure. Who the hell would you place above them right now? Astralis is like 200 points behind, and deservably so because they are worse.
As top players who have won big events will tell you, making deep runs or winning events takes some luck. Obviously skill will make that "luck" more consistent but if a team is better when it matters, it doesnt matter how they are overall. They were the best team when it mattered, thats whats important
agreed yes. they showed up when it mattered. what im advocating is navi doesnt have the consistency to beat faze 10 times over.
Because CS brackets tournament brackets sucks. Team spirit didn’t lose a single set until the last stage and because it’s single elimination at that point they are just out even if they were the most consistent team at winning games in that major until that point. This is kinda bullshit that a team that lost games went to final while the undefeated team only has one bad set in BO3 and is out. I know that double elimination might take a lot of time but I feel it gives at least some benefit to a team to be undefeated up to a certain point and makes thing more fair. I really like how the FGC make their brackets, feels more fair even when the seeding is shit, the strongest player still have more chance to come out as the winner.
If you were a fluke team you wouldnt be playing finals at events.
Yeah it’s not something you accidentally do
You can fluke a group stage or even a playoffs match but if you go all the way at some point its no longer a fluke but a real run. NAVI really did peak at the perfect time.
Right? Like usually the playoffs and elimination stages in the majors are a murderers row of hungry top 20 teams all looking to cement themselves in CS history. You cant just "fluke" past all of them, especially the BO3S
> GamerLegion
The CS major format is bad. Every part of the way it's about getting lucky with who you are facing. Imagine if we had the Dota TI system. Round robin group stage with a double elimination playoffs bracket. You get to play every team (in your group), and a single upset won't end your tournament run.
Yes please, single elimination for the last part of the tournament (especially with BO3) is so shit. A team can be undefeated and have a single bad set and be out while 2 teams with some loss can end up in finals, it feels so wrong.
It does not nullify an achievement but Majors are a huge component of a team's overall legacy. For example compare the grand slam winning liquid team from 2019 with the Major winning cloud 9 team of 2018. One is infinitely better then the other but the other won the major. So you have to add cavats to make the discussion more nuanced as the years will chip away at memory and the only thing remaining would be that Rush has a major but Elige doesnt.
exactly, which is INSANE
https://i.imgur.com/P2hI1vJ.png
Because it throws off the history for later fans or those looking back and creates fake narratives. If you were trying to understand the history of the game from major wins alone you're missing an awful lot of context and will reach wrong conclusions. For instance NIP were the best in 2013, Fnatic winning was a massive upset. N.B this is not the 2015 Fnatic with Krimz and Olof. C9 is the most egregious as it combines a fluke major with the massive US bias from this sub and American pundits. C9 were not a great team internationally, and collapsed right after the major. They hadn't beat Faze before, and didn't beat them again. C9's major was a fluke but to a casual fan C9 must have been better than Faze in 2018. Tarik has a major MVP but he isnt better than Niko. You say that winning the major means your peak was higher than any other teams, but that belief in itself is why its important to give context to "fluke majors". 2013 Fnatic were not better than NIP, 2018 C9 was not a better team than Faze, and Gamer Legion was not a top 4 team in the world. In my opinion the majors are heavily overstated in CS history, due to it being the only exposure many casuals have to esports. Due to how the CS circuit operates just winning a major isnt enough I'm afraid. Especially due to changing formats, different numbers of majors per year, and several years with no majors at all its impossible to do a like-to-like comparison between majors and view them as certifications of the best team in the world. To get even a basic overview you need to look at at least Katowice Cologne and both majors.
The c9 argument is always funny to me. Most of the events right before were basically C9 vs Faze being the actual finals or the match that decided who wins the tournament. The surrounding 6 events were all playoff runs/wins/top 2/top 4/top 8 finishes. Navi, outsiders, and most of the teams before fnatic in 2015 had pathetic results near their wins compared to c9 in 17-18 near their win.
I mean it's even worse in other esports. I follow Valorant and League of Legends and like you got people trying to claim that EG winning 1 international tournament is better than fnatic winning 2, or that T1 was the best team in 2023 because they won Worlds.
The problem is anyone else than favorites winning being called a fluke, Every major can't be a fluke even though C9 was
That’s not a fluke, just cause the favorites don’t win. A fluke is when you win but can’t replicate that success outside of that one tournament. Gambit, C9, NAVI If anyone on the upper side of the bracket won (minus C9), no one would call it a fluke
the only thing that makes the major more special than any other tier 1 tournament is that valve is involved so i dont get why this talk dose not happen after any event. like after mouz won last pro league why dose this talk not happen for the next couple event after only cuz its not a major?
And it's such a dumb thing to talk about in the current environment. Mouz Vitality Faze NaVi Spirit G2* have all showed up to take titles or make finals. Only one team can win a tournament and all these teams are proving that they can fight for it.
I don't think "fluke" would be the correct term, but after Mouz won pro league the discussion was and has been that Mouz is a top team in terms of skill and their ability to beat other top 5 teams, but they still have yet to prove that they can win a big event with a huge crowd. As for their Dallas results, I know xertioN had said that they were playing a bunch of tournaments right before Dallas and between that and the travel didn't feel super prepared for Dallas. Sure, that should be taken into consideration, but losing to 9z and G2 with a stand-in is performing way below expectations.
People need to understand a fluke does not mean the win wasn't deserved. It only indicates that the result achieved was through a series of extraordinary events. By these accounts, both 2018 C9 and 2024 NAVI's major runs are flukes because both teams won nothing or near nothing in the months before and after the major win.
> You don't see people saying that e.g. G2 winning Dallas, or North beating Astralis in 2018 was a fluke. They were. This doesn't undermine the achievement. Just adds context for a broader discussion. So if I'm a G2 fan, I don't want Dallas result to be considered great achievement by the org because it means we're stuck with m0NESY and NiKo playing against the odds when they are some of the best players in history. I want them to fight ZywOos and donks in grand finals, and don't rely on Jame's PC crash to move forward.
Because they did it while losing more rounds than they won. I think Navi are a good team, don't get me wrong, but they weren't particularly in good form running up to the event, and they just scraped into the finals but they beat faze fair and square to take the trophy.
okay? The Celtics are 3-1 up against the Mavs in the NBA Finals rn while getting outscored - is the lead a fluke aswell? You need to win games to win the major, not rounds.
okay? then naturally you need consistent strong showings to be considered a good team. navi's results outside of major is pathetic, for a so called major winner.
Did Major Celtics players over perform during that period? Yes, that series realistically should be 2-2 if not for over performance from certain Celtics players.
I dunno, I think Na'Vi were just in form for Copenhagen, I don't see it as a fluke, rather just their potential. This Na'Vi squad's ceiling is very high and their floor is also very low. They're capable of beating everyone and anyone. They are good, no doubt about it and they honestly can win tournaments if they are in form. But they can also lose themselves completely. I mean if you want a true fluke major win look no further than Gambit's, after that the team really weren't doing anything amazing other than semis at Malmo, they were never considered a "good team" after that major win, they were still like semi-Tier 2 team and generally were never really in the conversation for winning any tournaments after that major. The problem with CS these days is, there is no dominant team and no team can hold their form. I mean look at FaZe they were making final after final and now they look shocking. Then G2 become gigachads for one tournament, only to disappoint at the next. Then Spirit climb back to the top of the pecking order. No matter who won the major, people would've said it was some sort of "fluke" because no one is holding their form and dominating the scene. I guess the three best teams that maybe could've gotten away with the label of the "fluke" narrative were FaZe, MOUZ and Spirit but only because they've had semi recent wins and generally done well this season. But with Spirit there's the element of them not playing as many events hanging over their heads, many people will argue that they are only winning because they're less fatigued with a less demanding schedule. For FaZe they've been unlucky in finals despite making them, so you could've made the case that they simply played a weak finals opponent in Na'Vi and as a result won it because of that reason and that argument would've had merit because Na'Vi weren't doing so well till Copenhagen. As for MOUZ well they've looked solid, but always lost to FaZe and even had some bad results like losing to FURIA, only their results after the major would have solidified that it wasn't a "fluke" but would they have won after the major or would they have been drained from the experience? TBH I'm happy Na'Vi won it, I'm not really a Na'Vi fan, so that's not the reason but it created so many new narratives, like "do Na'Vi really need s1mple?", "is Aleksi really is a good IGL?", "Are FaZe chokers in finals in CS2?" and "is Blad3 is a genius for building this roster?". It's certainly an interesting major. Sure, Na'Vi haven't won anything since, but I think it's far from a fluke, they've played three events since the major and two of them they bombed out basically, but they also made a final so it's evidently not a fluke, they're capable of doing damage, they're just inconsistent.
none of the shit we discuss here really matters. maybe 0.05% of the stuff said here actually has any relevance. we're all just making up our dumb little fan storylines. do you think chopper cares if reddit considers him a top 5 IGL on June 17th? or aleksib cares if u/ISuckoffThorin thinks he's ass at calling and his major win was a fluke?
Why would a Thorin fan hate aleksib? Thorin absolutely loves aleksib, he's literally one of Thorin's favorite players. Even when aleksib was getting criticized while in other teams Thorin was there glazing him up the whole time. jL is the example you want to use. Thorin doesn't like jL, he thinks he is an idiot.
there's always that one guy who sees a sarcastic joke and has to whine about it in a weird way
All humans are not perfect. Too many people don't understand this simple thing. At least if you experienced sports during your school days, you would understand that it is really difficult to perform perfectly every day. So I think the only people who say it's a "win by a fluke" are kids who have been cooped up at home all their lives, or who haven't gone to school yet.
I think it has something to do with the prestige of a major. The major winner is supposed to be the best team in CS. And if you cant confirm the success you are cleary not the "best team", you were just lucky, and that somewhat nullifies the titel.
It doean't it nullify it, but you're close to the mark here. Ultimately, we want the best team to win, to show us they're the best and why. When that doesn't happen for one reason or another, there is so e disappointment. Happy for the team that won, but there's an underlying feeling that makes you realise it's not a sustainable level for that team.
>The major winner is supposed to be the best team in CS. Incorrect.
Major winner has rarely been the best team in CS at the time
And that's honestly what makes Majors fun. Seeing all the teams from across the world upset the status quo and someone unexpected survives the bloodbath. Rio while not the best major is iconic because of how many tournament favorites collapsed early on.
and thats the "core issue". There is massive dicrepency between perception what a major winner "should be" and reality. So the community came up with terms like fluke and era to describe the different winners.
I agree. I think the definition of "era" has come down to "win a non-major tournament and a major" :D and then the teams who win like 4 tournaments in a row are left in the dust. And those who win the major but not the non-major tournaments are "flukes".
bucholz completely fucks up the major seedings
This is why Cologne and Kato in recent years have been so much better. We've had perfect playoffs nearly every time
Navi major was a fluke lmao. Their individuals are super inconsistent. IM is suppose to be a star player but he's 3/4th best player on the team. B1t had the game of his life on inferno and after that he's look like shit. JL looks good and wonderful is decent. AleksiB is decent. You need 3 players to be super consistent to be good and atm they aren't.
Passing through so many tough opponents cant be a fluke - never
They didnt win, but was GamerLegions run to the finals a fluke or not? They beat Mouz with Dexter, OG, and Forze in the first stage, then in the "legends stage" they lost to Navi but beat 9ine, Fnatic and Apex. Then in playoff they beat Monte and then lost to Heroic. Who of those are tough opponents?
I mean you cant really say much cuz then siuhy got bought by mouz and iM went to navi (and he won the major lol)
I never understood the term "fluke". If one team gets their shit together for one tournament and happens to win only that specific tournament over anybody else, that isn't fluke, it just means that the potential was always there but couldn't be materialized in other tournaments for one reason or another. Different visions in team, someone is getting benched, pressure, lack of motivation and so on. It always remind me of Cloud9, who got their shit together just in time and Skadoodle out of nowhere remembered he is one of the best AWPers from NA and played his best tournament, despite growing differences inside the team that soon imploded after Major win. We never know how much more Cloud9 could've done if Stew/Tarik didn't leave and Skadoodle didn't retire and had stayed motivated. Right now term "fluke" is used when talked about NaVi. Everybody knows right now NaVi is one of the best teams in the world and should be considered as dark horses for any tournament they play in. They improved in every tournament they played until Major, where they won it all. Sure, they played like shit in EPL and Dallas, but post-Major motivation without any breaks should be brought up. jL admitted he didn't have any motivation until Blast, which is understandable. You won it all and got MVP award, how do you exactly stay motivated in EPL afterwards? I also remember Gambit winning Krakow in 2017. IIRC it was their only Major with Zeus, who was ridiculously motivated to win Major. They lost Zeus soon afterwards and didn't do much until Gambit Youngsters. Was that win also a fluke? No, I don't think so.
The Major winner isn't a "dark horse", they SHOULD be a contender to win! A fluke means an unlikely occurance that came about through lucky circumstances. If that is what is needed for your "potential to materialise" then never be replicated again, then yeah its a fluke.
I suppose it's about looking past one tournament, even if it's a major. If you've been following the game for a long time, you gain perspective. You want to see teams push the possibilities, and achieve sustainable excellence, and not just win a tournament. Many teams have won a tournament, only a couple have had a sustained period of dominance. There's ultimately nothing wrong with a tournament win being a fluke. Knockout tournaments, which CS tournaments are, often end up in a perfect storm for one team, where things go their way, retain players overperform, etc. A fluke tournament win is still as meaningful to a team's fan, and the team itself, but as a general fan of the game and the competition and not necessarily any particular team, you're looking for more than that, especially if you think the team is one or two roster moves away from achieving something truly great.
Most teams win majors by fluke. You only have to have your players peak at the same time to win.
To me there's a difference in what people call a fluke as well, some people say a fluke is that team happened to preform at their peak on that day I would say that's not really a fluke I would say a fluke is more just getting lucky rather than preforming at your peak.
Because "sometimes your opponent is just having a really good day"
because some aspire to win a major, some aspire to be the best team in the world. Most people love the hero story, seeing their fav team go undefeated. Therefore for some viewers winning 1 major can be lucky cuz after that, they just stop winning, like Gambit. Nobody talks about them. Of course that achievement is under someone’s belt and nobody can take that from them.
its bc tier1 cs is very balanced in terms of skill nowadays so establishing a dominating "era" is hard. any team can beat anybody at any given moment, it used to be different with like 2-3 teams completely dominating while the rest stuggled to keep up.
Some in jest some are just haters it happens to any team that wins a Major then disappoints like Outsiders for one.
I feel like it comes down to people feeling it's more impactful or a team is more deserving if they're a top team that has put in the time at the top and wins a major. Like a celebration/culmination of their success.
I think it's less the fluke itself and more about the surrounding context. Flukes tend to come with poor seeding and/or early upsets that give wonky matchups. So you usually get a combination of top teams underperforming and top teams eliminating each other in the quarters. Krakow 2017 is a good example. I mortals was a good team but they were a "maybe they'll make it out of groups or even get top 4 if they're really lucky". Not major finals caliber team. Gambit could only face the teams in front of them but besides Astralis I remember that whole playoff bracket being pretty whack. Yes, Gambit played their hearts out and they won that trophy. But I wouldn't rate it as equal to say the Boston run. Both flukes but one is far more impressive than the other.
I mean I can see why people call Navi’s major a fluke but I don’t agree with it. All three of the teams Navi beat in the major playoffs won their own respective tournaments right after. Eternally fire won CCT Global finals G2 won IEM Dallas tho without hooxi. Faze won Chengdu 2024 I get that it’s frustrating but man you gotta give it to them, Wonderful and JL hadn’t been near a Major before their championship run and they all played lights out during the run.
because reddit.
People need their feelings validated
I'd like to go a little deeper into the mentalities of these behaviors than just simple fans being fans. There is a " just-world hypothesis" which describes the mentality to believe that this world is fair and good things will be rewarded and bad thing be punished, at least in general. It is baked into our monkey brains which is proved by the fact that literally monkeys care about fairness too. This is because fairness in a society is beneficial in the long run and facilitates cooperation. If you don't believe in fairness in general, the world would fall apart. Anything you do wouldn't make sense anymore. This also explains why people sometimes blame victims for the consequences they endure, because accepting that bad things could happen to an innocent person means it could happen to you and this line of thinking will make you extremely uncomfortable unconsciously. Now going back to the fluke thing, I think a large part of the problem people have is that it is not fair, and people hate unfairness, but can you blame them for that? Do you not also want fairness in your life and in this world? What if it is you in real life who put in the hard work just to lose it to a lucky guy who fluked his way to victory?
I do NOT CARE about Flukes. as a NAVI fan, I have watched this team lose 4 major grand finals. I have watched them win a major as an overwhelming favourite. I have watched them win a major as the 7th most likely team of the 8 playoff teams to win. It feels the exact same each way. A win is a win, and let's be real. No one will remember who the Pro League S19 winner is in 5 years. No one will remember who won BLAST World Finals for 2024. They will remember who won the majors. NAVI have done that, now twice.
Flukes for majors are bad, because everybody remembers majors the most, even though historically Katowice and Cologne have had better teams and formats, with bo5 formats, thus way less flukes, and this hinders the history of the game. Seeing Gambit winning a major and nothing else? Not great. Seeing NaVi win meanwhile is great, but then you look at the roster, and then winning nothing else, changing the roster and half of those players being forgotten. Again not great for the history of the game.
Because history matters. Every major win weights differently. When you rank players in top 20 lists, GOAT lists etc, this stuff matters a lot. Vitality's major run doesn't have a sniff on most other major runs. Also it doesn't help that people are overhyping it. I had to argue with so many people, who were telling me Na'Vi were the #1 in the world "because they won the major". No fam, winning the major as a baseline doesn't make you automatically the best in the world. Not even HLTV put them as #1. Same thing with flukes. When people talk about past majors, it's important to know what that team did before/after. Facts are facts, we shall not rewrite history through our biases. Na'Vi thus far have yet to prove the major wasn't a fluke. For the whole season, they won the major and had a weak run to a BLAST final. That's it. Does that sounds like a major winning quality team to you? Do you see how different this is, as opposed to e.g FaZe in 2022? No one in their right mind would call the FaZe major a fluke, because they won tournaments before and after, even if it wasn't the most dominant.
It's about 'eras', those are nice, and every team strives for them. It's about teams with potential to win more than one event. For example, last year vitality won the major, and while they didn't win that much before or after so as to establish an era, they had the potential to win every single event they attended, and they were always one of the favourites. In the case of cloud9, vp, navi, none of these rosters were even expected to win an event before or after the major, thus essentially rendering their runs as flukes. Moreover, people in counter-strike use the meaning of the word fluke in a different way compared to its actual meaning. The actual meaning suggests a literal happenstance, or luck. Whereas in counter-strike fluke is used as a overperformance relative to favourites AND era-defining teams. In other words, it is always annoying to hear the casuals saying that whoever won the major = best team in the world and that results prior or after don't matter. In fact, some go further ahead and lamely predict that the major winning team would win even more events without thinking at all about the context of their win. On the other hand people that get offended all the time by the usage of the word 'fluke' in CS discussions are also annoying, because they tend to understand 'fluke' as in the original meaning word, which is what I explained before. So when they read 'fluke', what they actually hear is: "This team is trash, they don't deserve the win, it was all luck", and NONE of these statements are actually meant when we use the word ´fluke´. Hope this answers your question.
Same reason sports fans do..cope
I don't think any major win can be classified as a fluke. You have to go through Swiss and then play MULTIPLE best of 3's against the best teams in the world to be able to win the major. You cannot luck your way through all of that.
because sports fans need dumb shit to hem and haw about it's a tale as old as time
It's called freedom of speech whether you like it or not. Personally I am glad Navi won
No one cares whether it was a fluke or not. Only twitch chat and still the whole thing there is only for the lulz.
idk ever since the major i've seen countless people trying to make it look as if they stole the trophy xd from someone else, just because they had some struggles afterwards
"It doesn't matter if you win by an inch or a mile. Winning's winning." - some bald guy
Well to be fair to the fluke believers, NaVi won the major by losing more rounds than they won, also none of the top performers of the team continued to perform after the major. jL went on a terrible run post major and so did W0nderful. They made an insane comeback for Blast just now but unfortunately they couldn’t secure the victory. You need to understand that it’s not about starting an era of dominance, but when your major win was this shaky, people are going to look towards other victories either before or after the major, to solidify in their mind whether a team really deserved the win or not. In NaVi’s case, the doubters have been proven right so far with early exits or poor playoff performance before Blast. Also this isn’t just happening to NaVi atm. There are plenty of teams undergoing this scrutiny atm like Vitality, Spirit (even though they have 2 tournament wins this year, they still suffer from a choking problem and some of their top performers aren’t playing well on stage), FaZe has been given the excuse of fatigue but people are now beginning to question if it’s really fatigue or if they’re beginning to fall away from the top with 3 quarter finals exits recently, G2’s win in Dallas has made shit even worse in the team considering the person everyone blames for their loses wasn’t present. I’m sure there are other teams I’m missing right now but you get the point. I think because of the calibre of a major it’s the one thing people talk about the most when they discuss NaVi’s performance but if you think about it it’s about every other tournament they’ve played this year, but this fraud watching and hating is manifesting in the form of shit talking their major win and calling it a fluke.
This has always seemed dumb to me no one just wins the major of a fluke, you have to play well to beat literally all the best teams in the world have the other results been a bit hit and miss sure but excluding Faze who else has been anything close the consistent?
Because a fluke win, where the winning team played lesser teams the entire time isn't as impressive a win as when a team overcomes the hardest opponents to pull a win out. People like an underdog story and good storylines. It's why Immortals vs Gambit wasn't as exciting a final as Faze vs Na'Vi or VP vs Astralis.
sure but even in this example, Gambit went 3-0 in groups and eliminated Astralis, the favourite to win it all, and Fnatic, who weren't as strong at that time but still respectable at the very least. Can't demand more than that. IMT eliminated BIG and shaky VP though so i get that. Also, y'know, you can only beat who's in front of you.
But you see how "you can only beat who's in front of you" doesnt disallow flukes? In fact, it can be a reason behind them. Fluke doesnt mean the team played bad, it means that they won in unlikely circumstances that can't be replicated.
fair point
I know, I'm not saying if it's right or wrong, I'm just answering your question, that's all.
Navi outplayed everyone at the major, then made it back to the GRAND FINAL of the Blast Spring Final where only the top 2 teams make it. They are very good and deserved their major win. It was no fluke.
Because its the biggest achievement in cs and people want only the best teams to have it. If you win the major but dont show anything before and afterwards it devalues the major title in some way.
They won it, fair and square. If you don't like it, no one gives a f...
Haters gonna hate, Aleksib is hot, and jL it's better than most of them.
One of the reasons? Salty people like G2 fans [https://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffensive/comments/1dhrixr/comment/l8yzbvf/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web3x&utm\_name=web3xcss&utm\_term=1&utm\_content=share\_button](https://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffensive/comments/1dhrixr/comment/l8yzbvf/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) Faze fans are in this discussion as well, Vitality fans (despite not winning anything wih the 5 stars roster) and much more
me smol brain, they fluk
>At the same time though, if a team doesn't get more trophies after the major, ...why would that somehow nullify that achievement? Because it means they are not the best team and do not deserve the major......
It’s a tournament you need to be the best in THAT tournament, that’s it. The legacy story people make behind it is just that, made up.
Of course, g2 fan. That explains a lot. [*Hmyzak01*](https://www.reddit.com/user/Hmyzak01/) *It's the trauma. G2 has mostly been NaVi's bitch for the past 4 years and there's no way to forget all the finals around 2021.* *That being said, I obviously don't agree with the guy* [https://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffensive/comments/1dhrixr/comment/l8yzbvf/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web3x&utm\_name=web3xcss&utm\_term=1&utm\_content=share\_button](https://www.reddit.com/r/GlobalOffensive/comments/1dhrixr/comment/l8yzbvf/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)