CS:GO World Ranking December 2018

In December, there are only two major CS:GO events taking place because the players are on winter break for Christmas and New Year. The rankings have also had a few changes.

The first tournament of December is the ESL Pro League Season 8 Finals. Astralis made history by defeating Liquid to win their first Intel Grand Slam title and $1 million in prize money.

Not stopping there, the Danes continued to Portugal to end the year with another victory. At BLAST Pro Series Lisbon, gla1ve’s army topped the group stage (round-robin format) without losing a single map before beating Natus Vincere in the BO3 final.

In addition, fnatic won the PLG Grand Slam in Abu Dhabi after beating G2 2-0 in the final. It’s not just December’s only international mid-range tournament: Bucharest hosted the ESL Invitational, where AVANGAR won against Vega Squadron; Mumbai also has its own DreamHack tournament and Bravado is the winner. Finally we have ESEA MDL Season 29 Global Challenge held in Dallas USA and 3DMAX is the new king.

Scoring mechanism

Here are tTo summarize the factors that affect the scores of the teams on the leaderboard each month:

The leaderboard has a base score of teams based on their performance in the previous year (achievement points). Then there is the “Form” score, which is calculated based on the individual achievements of the Players in the team and the results of online tournaments in the last 2 months. Finally, the LANs point, this point is calculated based on the performance in offline tournaments within the last 3 months.

Also, if a team wants to keep their base score before the new month’s score is calculated, their lineup must hold at least 3 Players from the previous month. And as mentioned above, the results of the online competition only slightly affect the scores in the “Form” section and it is mainly counted for the purpose of ranking some new teams on the rankings (this is possible. Understandably, because LANs scores affect a lot, teams that don’t have an offline slot but want to go up the rankings only have tryhard countries in online tournaments).

Charts

Here is the standings of the teams for the month December 2018the “+/-” signs represent the team’s promotion and relegation, and the difference is when compared with the November 2018 rankings, not the weekly team rankings.

While there haven’t been many events this month, December has seen a number of rankings changes, some of which were due to roster changes. Here are the key highlights for December:

FaZe was pushed to the bottom of the top 10

The last 8 weeks of the year were quite quiet for FaZe – the team did not get the right to participate offline in ECS and ESL Pro League, thus missing the opportunity to earn points.

With only BO1 games at BLAST Pro Series Lisbon, FaZe achieved exactly 5 “performance” points, the least among the top 30 teams. Even worse, the team lost quite a few points after the roster change: Finn “karrigan Andersen makes way for Dauren “AdreN” Kystaubayev, who will stand-in for the team during the IEM Katowice Major.

However, things have not been hopeless for FaZe fans: the team will return at the iBUYPOWER Masters to earn more important points in the rankings as well as motivation before the Major.

fnatic is back in the top 10

Poor online form caused fnatic to miss out on ECS and EPL FINals, but the Swedish team still had reason to be pleased at the end of the year as it broke into the top 10 for the first time since September.

After the semi-finals of IEM Chicago, fnatic entered the PLG Grand Slam as a title contender despite making everyone ‘sweat’ along the way. The journey in Abu Dhabi ended the ‘cupless’ period that lasted all the way to the WESG World Finals. This is the first title that Simon “twist” Eliasson and Ludvig “Brollan” Brolin have won with fnatic.

fnatic will have a busy month as the team will attend iBUYPOWER Masters and IEM Katowice with the goal of reaching the playoffs to remove honors from the previous Major London.

Renegades is on the rise

After stopping at the Toyota Masters Bangkok semi-finals, Renegades ended 2018 by reaching the playoffs of ESL Pro League Season 8 Finals. They beat ViCi, BIG and G2.

The Odense journey saw the Australian team climb 13 places in the rankings, the highest ranking the team has achieved since June, when Nifty and USTILO were still in the squad. When Sean “Gratisfaction” Kaiwai and Jay “liazz” Tregillgas were added in early October, Renegades was near the bottom of the world top 30. But just three months later, they are very close to the highest ranking they have ever had in history (10th place).

In the second half of January, Renegades will attend the Asia Minor to continue his recent success and secure a spot in the Major.

New faces appear

December saw two teams enter the top 30 for the first time: Sharks and forZe. Both went deep at the PLG Grand Slam, but the Brazilian team (Sharks) proved themselves at the ESL Pro League Season 8 Finals – Sharks saw North off after 2 maps.

In Abu Dhabi, the Sharks beat TYLOO 2-0 and overcame G2 in their journey to the semi-finals. Meanwhile, the Russian team almost eliminated the new king of fnatic in the encounter. Previously forZe had won G2, AVANGAR and INTZ convincingly.

After returning to their homeland for the last few months of the year, the Sharks returned to Europe but with no tournaments waiting for them, it is certainly difficult for the Sharks to keep a place in the top 30. As for forZe, after the defeat. At the CIS Minor, they need to prove themselves more in the ESEA MDL and at the recently announced LOOT.BET HotShot Series Season 1.

According to HLTV