2018 was full of bright events in the CS:GO world.
The year began with a major event in Boston, in which the American team Cloud9 unexpectedly won the day for everyone, beating FaZe Clan in the final.
Cloud9 failed to consolidate at the top: Stewie2k moved to the Brazilian SK/MIBR team and the team began slowly falling apart.
It is worth noting the good performance of the CIS teams in this tournament. Vega Squadron and Quantum Bellator Fire were really good.
The main scandal in 2018 was the situation with Forsaken from OpTiC India, who was caught cheating right during the LAN tournament. The situation became “memed” because of the cheat file name, which was “word.exe”. The player was banned from parttaking in tournaments for 5 years.
This year also saw a lot of disintegration of teams. The most serious upheavals were the collapses of Cloud9 and SK/MIBR. The Brazilian line-up decided to get rid of boltz and TACO, replacing them with Stewie2k and tarik from Cloud9. Stewie’s departure from the American team launched the process of team breakup: Skadoodle soon announced the end of his esports career.
Stewie’s transition to MIBR did not produce the desired result. The main problem was communication. Later, tarik joined the team, but the team did not play. And by the end of 2018, MIBR decided to return the Brazilian line-up by exchanging Stewie2k and tarik for TACO and Zews (coach) at Cloud9.
Astralis was certainly the team of the year. After an unsuccessful performance at ELEAGUE Major: Boston, the Danish team noticeably improved during the year. Astralis won a large number of tournaments and FACEIT Major: London 2018. They also became the first team to win the Intel Grand Slam, which gained them $1,000,000.
