The Spanish native AWP main Antonio “MartinezSa” Martinez has signed with Movistar Riders, the current best CSGO team in Spain, to fill the place left available by the move of Alvaro “SunPayus” Garcia which happened earlier this week.
SunPayus was technically the best player in the Movistar Riders roster, having assisted the entire Spanish team to win ESL Challenger Valencia around July and achieve the semifinals spot in IEM Cologne, one of the most coveted CSGO events of the competitive scene, all of this in the same month. He is reportedly signing with ENCE to take the place of Aleksander “hades” Miskiewicz, who was benched earlier on August 5th.
According to a lot of CSGO betting experts, MartinezSa will definitely have some big expectations to meet. The AWP main previously played for VELOX and doesn’t have much experience against Tier 1 teams, which Movistar Riders will definitely battle against more often after finishing the first half of the season on a high place.
Currently MartinezSa has a total of only 22 maps recorded on HLTV’s records this year and one of them was against a top 50 CSGO team in the world rankings. The rookie has averaged a 1.13 rating throughout his career. The obvious question is if he’ll be able to do it against better, more experienced enemies and ultimately help Movistar Riders to maintain their good performances.
MartinezSa is set to start a rather tough debut as Movistar Riders’ first scheduled tournament after the summer player break will be ESL Pro League season 16, a competitive league that features the best teams in the scene. The Spanish based team were drawn in Group D which includes: Cloud9, Team Liquid, FURIA, Evil Geniuses, and Eternal Fire.
Peacemaker Leaves Imperial
Now going into our next roster move, CSGO head coach peacemaker has finished his time with the Imperial roster, current team of Major champions Gabriel “FalleN” Toledo, Fernando “fer” Alvarenga, and Lincoln “fnx” Lau after working for around six months as the head coach for the team.
Peacemaker is no longer under contract with Imperial and will look for other opportunities as a head coach “with a lot of commitment and now even more experience”, as he stated via his own Twitter announcement. He ultimately thanked FalleN, fer, fnx, Vinicius “VINI” Figueiredo, and boltz for their time together as a roster, as well as the Imperial management for clarity during the process.
During his coaching stint with Imperial, peacemaker assisted the team to qualify for PGL Antwerp Major around May, the actual first of the two Valve sponsored events of the year. Imperial was extremely close to securing a playoffs spot in the competition but sadly struggled to adapt the same good performance later on in other S tier events like IEM Cologne around July against better opposition.
It’s rather unknown at the moment if Imperial will look to sign a new head coach to replace peacemaker or if all the practice and strategies will be handled entirely by FalleN and the rest of the lineup.
