DreamHack Open Winter 2018 Analysis and Predictions

DreamHack Open Winter 2018 is a smaller CS:GO event that’s taking place in Sweden these days, between November 30th – December 2nd. The tournament is attended by 8 teams, offers a prize pool of $100.000 and provides a lot of betting opportunities.

Even though it’s just a tier 2 event and as a result, a smaller tournament compared to the standard $300.000 competitions, DreamHack Open Winter 2018 has several tier 1 teams competing in it and that will pretty much guarantee an amazing show.

Participants

DreamHack Open Winter 2018 brings together the following 8 teams:

• OpTic Gaming
• ENCE eSports
• Team LDLC
• G2 Esports
• Heroic
• compLexity Gaming
• x6tence Galaxy
• Bravado Gaming

With the exception of the final two teams mentioned on this list, every other participant is a serious contender with decent chances of winning the grand prize of $50.000.

Event format

DreamHack Open Winter 2018 takes place in 2 stages. It is an absolutely standard CS:GO event, so the format is nothing spectacular.

For the Group Stage, the eight participants will be split into two groups of four. Each group will be played in a double-elimination bracket format, the good old classic GSL. The opening and winners’ matches are Bo1s. Every other match during the competition will be a Bo3 series. The top two teams from each group will advance to the Playoffs, which consists of three matches in total: two Semifinals and one Grand Final.

Groups

The teams participating at DreamHack Open Winter 2018 will be divided into the following two groups:

Group A

• Heroic
• Team LDLC
• x6tence Galaxy
• compLexity Gaming

Group B

• G2 Esports
• ENCE eSports
• Bravado Gaming
• OpTic Gaming

The strongest competitors in Group A are Team LDLC, Heroic and compLexity Gaming. It’s a bit difficult to differentiate between these 3 teams because they’re all at a similar level of skill. So any two of them could in principle survive the first stage and advance to the Playoffs.

In Group B the situation is very similar. OpTic Gaming, ENCE eSports and G2 Esports have roughly equal chances to advance out of the group and move on to the next stage.

Prize pool

DreamHack Open Winter 2018 offers a symbolic prize pool of $100.000. This is quite standard for a tier 2 tournament. I say symbolic because I’ve gotten used to the $250.000 – $1 million prize pools from the tier 1 tournaments.

The money will be shared among the eight participating teams in the following way:

1st place – $50.000
2nd place – $20.000
3rd – 4th place – $10.000
5th – 6th place – $3.000
7th – 8th place – $2.000

Team analysis

Here’s a short analysis of the teams involved:

compLexity Gaming

Since September, when compLexity Gaming finished 5th-8th at the FACEIT Major: London 2018, the team attended different competitions but wasn’t able to stand out. Anyway, there are a few good results the team managed to gather: 4th place at cs_summit 3, 2nd place at MSI Gaming Arena 2018, 3rd – 4th place at DreamHack Open Atlanta 2018, 9th place at ESL Pro League Season 8 and 6th place at ECS Season 6.

Going into DreamHack Open Winter 2018, compLexity Gaming should be a strong contender, especially when taking into account its roster and recent results. Moreover, the experience compLexity has after playing against some of the world’s strongest tier 1 teams can only raise our hopes of seeing them in the Grand Final.

ENCE eSports

A team with quite some skill and potential, ENCE eSports still lacks consistency when playing at a high level. DreamHack Open Winter 2018 is one of the tournaments that gathers strong teams from all over the world, so we still have to see how their game will be.

In this competition, ENCE has the ability to advance to the final rounds, especially with great players such as allu and some pretty impressive results.

In the past 3 months, they have managed to score some great achievements, which include: 2nd place at DreamHack Open Montreal 2018, 1st place at StarSeries & i-League CS:GO Season 6, participation and 7th – 8th place at EPICENTER 2018, and 1st place at Assembly GameXpo 2018.

Competing at the DreamHack Open Winter 2018, ENCE Esports has to be better than at least one of its two rivals in Group B – G2 Esports or OpTic Gaming – so that it can get a top 4 overall. However, those two teams are hard to beat at this level of competition.

G2 Esports

Despite the fact that the players had a lot of chances of playing together as a team, it seems that G2 Esports is far from being in an excellent shape. If we think about the fact that this is a French roster and that even the team member who is not French speaks their language, we cannot say that communication is the barrier here.

In the past 3 months, they managed to score only 3 good results: 9th – 11th place at FACEIT Major: London 2018, 5th – 6th place at ESL One: New York 2018 and 7th – 8th place at cs_summit 3.
Going into DreamHack Open Winter 2018, it should be more than easy for G2 Esports to compete in the Grand Final. Yet, taking their present situation into account, we should be surprised if they manage to advance to the Playoffs Stage.

Heroic

As Heroic is just about to play in the Grand Final of TOYOTA Master CS:GO Bangkok 2018 at the moment of this writing, we clearly see that the team is at one of the highest peaks in their career. The moment when friberg joined the team earlier this year marked a new beginning for the Danes, as they started to gather important results.

Therefore, over the last 4-5 months, they managed to get the following: 5th – 6th place at CS:GO Asia Championships 2018, 3rd – 4th place at DreamHack Open Valencia 2018, 3rd – 4th place at DreamHack Open Austin 2018, 5th – 6th place at cs_summit 3, 5th – 8th place at DreamHack Masters Stockholm 2018, and 1st place at Games Clash Masters 2018.

When comparing to the rest of the teams in Group A, I can definitely predict that Heroic will qualify to the Playoffs and, with a bit of inspiration, even win the entire event.

Team LDLC

Over the last few months, LDLC made a lot of progress and, because of its great players, started to make a name for itself. For example, the French team won the title at both ESL Pro European Championship 2018 and ESL Championnat National Winter 2018, while also being placed 5th – 6th at Intel Extreme Masters XIII Chicago and 6th in the Esports Championship Series Season 6 (Europe).
With limited chances of qualifying to the Playoffs of DreamHack Open Winter 2018, LDLC will face some challenges in trying to defeat one of its rivals – Heroic and compLexity Gaming.

OpTic Gaming

In the past 3 months, OpTic Gaming gathered the following results: the 2nd place at both cs_summit 3 and GG.BET Shuffle, as well as the 3rd – 4th place at StarSeries & i-League CS:GO Season 6. Contrary to the big tournaments where this team has quite a difficult time, tier 2 and tier 3 events are opportunities for it to show its power. With this in mind, DreamHack Open Winter 2018 might be just the place for OpTic to put on a great show, even though the team will be facing some challenges in Group B.

x6tence Galaxy & Bravado Gaming

When compared with other teams taking part in DreamHack Open Winter 2018, these two merely stand a chance. At this level of competition and given their previous results, it is irrelevant to start analyzing them. Except for the case when some of the stronger teams are performing badly, you can expect for both teams to finish 4th in their groups.