Chaos won’t play in the IEM Global Challenge, ESL and Chaos announced today.
Some of the CS:GO players on Chaos are unable to travel to Europe due to “health reasons,” according to ESL. Despite the tournament organizer’s best wishes to invite a North American team to replace Chaos, it wouldn’t be “feasible” to bring either Team oNe or Triumph to Europe. BIG will take Chaos’ spot instead.
Vanity, Xeppa, leaf, Jonji, and MarKe—who just won DreamHack Masters Winter North America against Team oNe yesterday—won’t play any more events under Chaos. The organization will leave the CS:GO scene and the future of the team is uncertain at the moment. Vanity, for example, already said he’s open to offers from VALORANT and CS:GO teams.
Chaos became a solid team this year after adding Xeppa, Jonji, and leaf to play around steel’s structure. Vanity took over the squad’s in-game leadership when steel switched to VALORANT in August and led the team to two tournament wins at IEM Beijing-Haidian North America in November and the aforementioned DreamHack Masters Winter North America.
BIG, on the other hand, won three relevant tournaments between June and August: DreamHack Masters Spring Europe, cs_summit six Europe, and DreamHack Open Summer Europe. The Germans, however, didn’t keep up with that form after the player break and most recently earned a top-six finish at Flashpoint season two.
Here’s the full list of teams for the IEM Global Challenge, which will be played from Dec. 15 to 20.
- Vitality
- Astralis
- Heroic
- BIG
- FURIA
- Natus Vincere
- Complexity
- Liquid
