Elliott Griffiths

The bigger they are, the harder they fall is a proverb that, unlike many others, is both literally and figuratively true, and there are few bigger in Counter-Strike than FaZe Clan.

Team Vitality are the best team of all time, and it's getting harder and harder to find a reasonable argument against that statement.

Vitality coasted to an easy win over a pretty lacklustre Aurora - though who can blame them.

As everyone raced in to blame some variation of Team Spirit leadership, be it magixx, Hally or both, there was one lone voice that leapt to the defence of the new leader of Spirit.

Often, when a player racks up loads of kills and his team loses, there's a little bit of nuance to it and maybe he wasn't playing quite as well as the surface numbers suggest. This was not one of those cases.

It was a great day to be a big dog in Rotterdam.

It's been a long time since MOUZ have had this bad a placement - in fact, it's the first time they've had a group stage exit with Spinx in the team.

When will the pain and suffering end?

It's looking bleak for MOUZ - they're not even winning in the group stage now.

Despite Valve last night deciding to make a pretty decent-sized changeto the reload mechanic, BLAST have made the (sensible) decision to continue with the previous patch for the rest of the tournament.

Valve have once again meddled with a mechanic that seemingly nobody had any issue with.

It was nice to see some flickers of life from FaZe while it lasted.

w0nderful put up a performance for the ages to grant NAVI the win in Stockholm; but should he have been the MVP?

NAVI overpowered Aurora in four to take home the ESL Pro League S23 trophy in what ended up being quite a comfortable win in the end.

NAVI overcame their old friends FUT as their rifle core got the better of the feared FUT trio in ways MOUZ - among many others - have failed to do.

We would like to issue a formal apology to Astralis and HooXi for suggesting there was no world in which they would beat Team Spirit.

This looks like either MOUZ or Spirit’s tournament to lose - and yet we don’t feel fully comfortable in backing either of them.

According to Finnish news website 'ILTALEHTI', Aleksib has been accused (or charged with, depending on the translation) of aggravated tax fraud.

In a fashion so typical of G2 that we could have written this three days ago had we been braver, they fell from a 2-0 start to a 2-3 exit.

Astralis nudged past a resilient FaZe in a game that made us wish FaZe weren't so awful most of the time - because they're so fun when they're good.