ESL Challenger League Season 41 Group C Kicks Off!
It’s the third week of the European ECL S41 and until now we didn’t have a chance to see some of the best teams in the whole tournament battle it out. AGO, Copenhagen Flames, Falcons Esports and SAW are the teams that will be fighting for the best seeding during the entire week, but we already might have some favorites before their matches even begin.
Copenhagen Flames is the only team in the whole tournament that is also playing at the PGL Major Antwerp 2022, and it almost seems unfair. The other three teams playing in Group C are very similar when it comes to skill level, so this makes it hard to predict which team will be tailing the Flames in the standings.
Last season, SAW had a 3rd-place finish after recently promoting into the league, which upset many esports picks. Now they come into this ECL season as one of the strongest teams in the league and will try to secure at least a top-2 finish in Group C.
AGO missed the last ECL season because they were playing at the ESL Pro League Season 15 against some of the strongest teams in the world, and although they didn’t manage to get a top-12 finish, they had a good performance agains the likes of Complexity Gaming and Evil Geniuses.
AGO Has a Heavy Schedule Coming This Week
The Polish team is currently playing in the ESL Challenger League Season 41 and the Y-Games PRO Series 2022, which means that they are playing at least two games a day against teams that are far from being top teams in Europe, but they are still tough competition and many cs-go betting experts agree on this. AGO has to play against teams like Copenhagen Flames, NAVI Junior, and ALTERNATE aTTaX, which are some of the strongest teams playing in 2nd division tournaments.
Most recently we saw them play at the Pinnacle Cup 4, where they failed to make it out of the Swiss stage after playing 5 best-of-3 series, which is quite a lot. They had a bad start as they couldn’t manage to take down MASONICS, one of the teams that qualified through the play-in. And although they were able to win versus 4glory and BLUEJAYS, they ended up losing their series against K23 and SKADE.
Now after having a rough patch at the Pinnacle Cup, AGO will try to bounce back from their losing streak as they’ll have to play at least two series in the ECL Season 41 if the want to make to start off in the playoffs’ upper bracket.
SAW Dominated The Circuito Retake Season 4
The Circuito Retake is one the most recognized Iberian circuits in the scene, where they host monthly tournaments with the best teams from Portgual and Spain. The Portuguese squad SAW is one of the teams playing at the circuito and they recently completely dominated the last tournament as they almost had a perfect playoffs run. Their first opponent was Panthers Esports and they were the only ones that managed to take SAW to a third game in the series, and those games were really close.
After taking down Panthers Esports, SAW had a pretty easy run where they had to take down Fourteen Esports and GTZ Bulls Esports. SAW finished the semifinals and grand finals with a total round difference of +33, that just shows how they simply overpowered their opponents. And although SAW didn’t manage to get into PGL Major Antwerp, they defied the cs-go odds as they almost managed to qualify for it.
They started off the tournament against BIG, one of the teams that qualified directly to the Legends Stage, but couldn’t do much against them. Then they took down Team Unique and Fnatic in a convincing manner which meant they were 1 series away from qualifying. Unfortunately for them, they came really close at taking down both Outsiders and ForZe in their respective series, but ultimately ended up losing both series in a 1-2 fashion.
SAW vs AGO Game Information
- Date: Tuesday, May 17th
- Time: 12:00pm ET
- Live Stream: Twitch.tv
SAW vs AGO Predictions
These two teams haven’t faced up ever, so the head-to-head record is clean, but SAW has been seeing more action as of recently. AGO has played only 5 series in the last month, while SAW has played 8 series and against much better teams than the ones that AGO faced.
After failing to qualify for the PGL Major Antwerp, SAW had a big slump where they started losing almost all their matches against Portuguese teams and dropped a series against FTW, which raised a lot of concerns. But somehow they reset their mental and won had an excellent run at the Circuito Retake.
I think that SAW is a much better team coming into this match esxpecially if we consider that AGO mostly performs well on LAN, which this isn’t the case. I think that SAW will have a good start to this ECL season and move into the playoffs’ upper bracket.
