ESL Challenger Melbourne, a $100,000 CS:GO tournament won by paiN Gaming this past weekend, didn’t go the way OG’s fans planned.
The international team headlined by the Russian AWPer Abdulkhalik “degster” Gasanov arrived in Australia after besting Complexity, Astralis, and FaZe Clan at BLAST Premier Fall Groups. The team, by far the top-ranked team in ESL Challenger Melbourne, seemed out of sorts in the Australian servers.
OG scrapped a win against Wings Up, a Chinese CS:GO team, in the opening round and then lost to Entropiq (16-13) before being sent home by Wings Up 2-0 in the decider series of group A. Degster and Nemanja “nexa” Isaković were the only ones on OG’s side to finish ESL Challenger Melbourne with a rating above 1.00, an indicator of the squad’s struggles in Australia. One of the reasons for OG’s lackluster performance at ESL Challenger Melbourne is the lack of preparation ahead of the event.
“I’m not going to lie here—we didn’t have any preparation for the tournament [in Melbourne],” degster said in an interview with Snowball Esports. “We didn’t have any PCs with us, so it felt super weird in our first game against Wings Up. We normally have one to three hours of practice before [each game] but it feels weird to just sit down and play straight away.”
Even though the result at ESL Challenger Melbourne was disastrous, it will give OG plenty of material to work on during the preparation for IEM Rio Major Europe Regional Major Ranking (RMR), the tournament that will decide whether OG qualify for the next CS:GO Major or not. Degster and crew don’t have any events scheduled until the RMR kicks off on Oct. 4.
