FaZe break their second-place curse
FaZe have undoubtedly been the best team in Counter-Strike 2 so far, but that hasn't prevented them from enduring their fair share of heartbreak.
They opened their account in CS2 with three straight tournament wins at IEM Sydney 2023, the Thunderpick World Championship, and the CS Asia Championship, but after that, they went on a run of four events that ended in second-placed finishes.
Photo: Stephanie LindgrenThat has now come to an end with their victory at IEM Chengdu 2024, so let's take a look at how it happened and how they managed to break their curse.
The end of 2023
The final two tournaments of 2023 saw FaZe play in the grand finals of both BLAST Premier Fall and World Finals, falling to Vitality on both occasions.
The first of these two events, Fall Final, is a hard one to judge. Vitality had just gone through a roster change with mezii arriving from fnatic, while everyone was simply waiting for FaZe's own roster change, the departure of Twistzz, to happen.
It can be attributed to Vitality's honeymoon period or even to Karrigan and his men's unassailable instability.
Still, it was always going to be hard to overcome what was going on outside of the server in Copenhagen.
Photo: Stephanie LindgrenAs for World Final, it was now FaZe's turn to bed in a new player as frozen joined from MOUZ.
The Slovakian had a reasonable event; he ended it with a 1.08 HLTV rating, but this is far lower than the 1.20, 1.17 and 1.22 he would pick up at the first three tournaments FaZe would attend in 2024.
Having now watched FaZe play in 2024, it's easy to understand why they didn't win in Abu Dhabi. Their game has been changed massively since frozen joined with many of their players seeing slight role changes, implementing that just wouldn't have been possible in the time they had to prepare for World Final.
Katowice and the Major
The two biggest heartbreaks will have come at IEM Katowice and the PGL Major Copenhagen, especially given the run they went on in the latter.
Going chronologically, there probably isn't anyone in the world who needs to be told why FaZe didn't manage to claim their second Katowice crown in three years. It's simple, they got donked.
In Katowice, donk put up record-breaking numbers. He ended the event with an incredible 1.70 HLTV rating, and let's be real, when someone is in that kind of form, there's simply no stopping them.
donk was just destined to announce himself to the world at that event.
However, Copenhagen was a different story.
Photo: Michal KonkolPresented with their best chance to win a trophy, FaZe did the hard thing by taking down Spirit and Vitality in the playoffs. The Karrigan revenge tour was in full swing, and he had stopped the two teams that had gotten in his way in the months leading up to the Major.
But then along came jL, b1t, and Aleksib.
Majors are often won by players hitting peak form at just the right moment. Gambit did it in 2017, Virtus.pro in 2022, and Cloud9 did so by beating a karrigan-led FaZe in 2018.
This is precisely what happened for NAVI in Copenhagen. A perfect storm that caused what will undoubtedly be one of the hardest moments of Karrigan's legendary career - but that wouldn't stop him from tasting victory at the very next event he attended.
Photo: Stephanie LindgrenThe curse is broken
Even as IEM Chengdu began and FaZe suffered an early defeat to Astralis, it always felt like Chengdu was FaZe's event to lose.
Given Vitality and Spirit's absence from the event, FaZe were the vast favourites. However, they bounced back with wins over FlyQuest, Liquid, and Astralis on their way to a grand final against MOUZ.
A team tied to FaZe due to their shared history with ropz, frozen, and karrigan, MOUZ have struggled any time they have played FaZe and the same was true for the final game in China.
Photo: Michal KonkolA quick 2-0 win for FaZe, the former-Major winners took the series 13-10, 13-6, and their victory was never in doubt.
Boosted by another strong event from frozen and an MVP performance by broky, their victory was comfortable, and they had finally broken their second-place curse heading into a busy few months before the player break.
With FaZe yet to play ESL Pro League, IEM Dallas, and BLAST Premier Spring Final, they will now go into all these events as the favourite.
No longer shackled by the mental barrier of repeated second-place finishes, we could very well be closing out Spring Final having anointed FaZe with an era.