Heroic Are Now the #1 Team in CS:GO

Heroic are now regarded as the number-one team in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.

This isn’t the first time when they achieve this performance. In October 2020, the Danish organization managed to do the same thing but with a slightly different roster. For Casper “cadiaN” Moller, who joined in April 2020, that was the first taste of success.

But it didn’t last long. Now, two years later, his team is back to being ranked #1 globally and seems to have improved enough to maintain its position at least until the Paris Major. The first real test will come much sooner though, at BLAST Premier: World Final, scheduled for December 14-18.

Heroic’s Rise to Glory

https://twitter.com/heroicgg/status/1597293038732468224

For people who don’t regularly follow CS:GO, Heroic’s success seems to have come out of the blue. But that’s not what happened. They’ve actually been working hard for several years and during this time, they have always been a top-15 team.

Heroic spent most of their last two years in the top 5. Their presence in the playoffs of important events was nearly constant, but other competitors were always a bit stronger. This meant that Heroic had very few opportunities to compete in Grand Finals and had to be satisfied with finishing 3rd – 8th.

There have been exceptions, of course, such as their victories from ESL One Cologne 2020, ESL Pro League Season 13, and Pinnacle Cup Championship. But for the most part, Grand Finals were out of the question.

Then, at IEM Rio Major, Heroic achieved a spectacular result and came very close to winning the tournament. The team lost the Grand Final against Outsiders but definitely proved their strength in the process.

Just a few weeks later, Heroic participated in BLAST Premier Fall Finals 2022, where they defeated world-class opponents like G2 Esports, Team Liquid, and FaZe Clan. All of these matches were difficult and required three maps to conclude, but Heroic proved to be good enough to win under pressure, regardless of how strong the opponent is.

Heroic’s Big Advantage

Earlier this year, Heroic changed one of their players Ismail “refrezh” Ali, who had been playing for the team since February 2021, and replaced him with Jakob “Jabbi” Nygaard, a very young player who was obviously very talented and very hungry for titles. This was the perfect combination for cadiaN.

Initially, Heroic’s results got worse. But as soon as the roster achieved a high level of fluency, it became clear that the change was a smart one.

https://twitter.com/heroicgg/status/1596972532644864002

More recently, Heroic received a huge gift from Valve. The company decided to update the game and make some important changes. One of those changes was the removal of Dust II from the Active Duty Map Pool. And Dust II just happened to be Heroic’s weak point.

CadiaN and his team do not play the map at all and as a result, they always had to ban it against every opponent. This eliminated the opportunity to ban the adversary’s strongest map, which often resulted in unnecessarily tough matches for Heroic.

But now that Dust II no longer needs to be banned, the Danish team can use their first ban offensively instead of defensively. And that might help them to remain at the top for a very long time.

Header: Heroic