Evil Geniuses are the first CS:GO team eliminated from the BLAST Premier Spring Groups following a harsh 2-1 defeat to Complexity in the first round of the knockout stage today.
The defeat to their fellow North American rivals means that EG no longer can qualify for the Spring Final through the Spring Groups and will instead have to attend the American Showdown in April and face non-partnered BLAST teams for a spot in the $425,000 Spring Final in June.
EG are not a tier-one team nowadays, but they got everyone’s attention after taking down the No. 1 CS:GO team in the world Heroic in the opening round. Unfortunately, EG couldn’t capitalize on that victory and ended up showing it was just a massive fluke instead. The North Americans lost to Vitality 2-0 in the second round, were defeated 2-1 by Heroic in their rematch, and today suffered two one-sided losses to Complexity (16-7 on Anubis and 16-8 on Overpass).
Sanzhar “neaLaN” Iskhakov, the in-game leader for EG, looked quite disheartened in the post-match interview with James Banks after their elimination and answered all of his questions regarding the team’s performance by saying they need to review what happened against Complexity first. Daniel Vorborg, EG’s coach, was more incisive than neaLan on his Twitter and shared his thought’s on the state of the team at the start of the 2023 season.
“Rough loss today, we simply need to be better, and we’ll work our asses off to get there,” vorborg said. “We can play great CS, but obviously we just aren’t near consistent and solid enough yet, and we give up to many advantages too easily. A couple of days to grow, then we play [at IEM] Katowice.”
The lack of consistency also interferes with the individual performance of EG’s players. None of them averaged a positive HLTV rating at the BLAST Premier Spring Groups. In fact, none of them averaged a rating higher than 0.90.
EG will play against Fnatic in the opening round of IEM Katowice’s play-in stage on Wednesday, Feb. 1 at 6:30am CT. Only eight of the 16 teams in this stage will move to the group stage and join the directly qualified teams.
