Giants' Rhyme on "When teams have nothing to lose"

The Valorant Champions Tour 2023 is underway and we have been following all the high-level action within the Valorant servers. One thing has caught up our attention though: how better some teams started performing when they had nothing to lose.

1) Newzera out, ZE1SH in

To start this list, we have Karmine Corp who recently saw "Newzera" leave and have assistant coach "ZE1SH" as a stand-in. With the transfer window currently closed, ZE1SH will play regularly until the next window opens.

What seemed to be a tragedy, at least on paper, proved to be quite the contrary. KC managed to perform far better with ZE1SH than compared with Newzera, something not everyone would see coming. Specially considering the absolute lack of Tier 1 experience the assistant coach had. This change, however, put KC in the "nothing to lose" mode.

2) "Sorry Zeek"

The second team was Team Heretics who decided to drop "Zeek" due to "personality issues" and replaced him with assistant coach "Weber". This was also due to the same transfer restrictions and lack of a proper sixth player.

Update on our #VCTEMEA team: pic.twitter.com/8hC5tE5COC

— Team Heretics (@TeamHeretics) May 4, 2023

Team Heretics recent performances, however, showed again that having a stand-in does not necessarily mean you will perform worse, specially when you have nothing to lose.

3) Can content creators play too?

The latest team to feature in this "playing with a stand-in" category was Team Liquid that did not have Saif "Sayf" Jibraeel available to play due to health issues.

"Harmii", Liquid's content creator, played againt NA'VI to keep their hopes of a playoff spot.

As some of you may know, @DSajoof has been sick for the last couple of days and is unable to play tomorrow.

However we are still playing thanks to @Harmii_ who will sub in for Sayf in our match vs NAVI 🙌

Show Harmii that Liquid love and get well soon Sayf 💙

— Team Liquid Valorant (@LiquidValorant) May 4, 2023

Despite their loss to NA'VI, it was again a very interesting performance from the team as whole.

We then raised the question: How can a team, theoretically worse, perform better than before?

We do have our hypotyhesis, but we preferred to ask a pro his thoughts in the subject as a whole. Earlier today, Team Giant's IGL Emir "Rhyme" Muminovic answered us some questions and, at the very end of the interview, dug into the theme and shared his perspective:

First, he talked about teams who start very poor on an tournament

"(...) teams who go 0-4 or 1-5, (...) they lose all the pressure, they play for nothing anymore. (...) Take Koi as an example, (...) it wouldn't surprise me if they play a super close game against Optic, (...) just the fact that they have nothing to play anymore, they are just playing to play, it's 'whatever' right now"

Then he analyzed the "stand-in" situation especcifically mentioning the Zeek-Weber switch

"(...) today is probably a good example, (...) it shows that individuals can play better when kind of the pressure is gone surely, but also when some factors are gone. For example, 'mixwell' played super good today compared to previous weeks and (...) we expected that some of player will feel better and play better (...)"

With that, it is clear to us that professional teams have a tendency to perform better when the stakes are low and the expectations do not pressure them into minimizing mistakes, this is specially true when stand-ins are playing because no team is expected to be flawless in a flawed composition.

However, it is also true that this "low pressure" environment is not the end goal of any team that is looking to become a high-value organization with accolades into their histories, that is, going 0-4 or not having a full five team roster should be avoided.