⚡️ The greatest Major runs [deep-dive]

Eight years ago, Cloud9 won their only Counter-Strike Major at the ELEAGUE Boston Major 2018. And yes, this is where you can insert your obligatory FaZe Clan choking joke.

A year earlier, Astralis won their first Major at the ELEAGUE Atlanta Major 2017, a victory that would kick off a run that saw them win four out of six Major trophies in the run-up to the COVID pandemic.

Although different, both of these runs will go down in history as some of the greatest of all time, but who else stands tall in that category? Do you need to win the trophy? Or can defying the odds be enough to become legend?

I’ll give you a hint: it’s the latter.

The three-peat

fnatic, SK/LG, Vitality - what do all of these orgs (or cores) have in common? They’ve all won back-to-back Majors.

You know what they haven’t done? Won three in a row. That is a club with only one member: Astralis.

It feels insane to say it now, considering how bad they’ve been for years, but at one point in time, the Astralis era looked like it might never end. Even as Liquid appeared to take over in 2019, Astralis came back and quite literally threw the NA squad off the top of a high-rise building at StarLadder Berlin.

It really didn’t matter who you put in their way, either. They took them all down. Sure, there were some Swiss losses here and there, but they don’t matter when you lift the trophy at the end of it, and they managed to do so each time with ease.

Of course, there are some caveats to this run: they beat ENCE and AVANGAR in two of the finals, but you can only beat the teams in front of you, and when those teams came - whoever they were - Astralis saw and conquered.

It wasn’t like their games before finals were equally mismatched; they didn’t just fortuitously dodge the top teams, they just were so good that no team could truly hope to match them. NAVI. FaZe. MIBR. NRG (they were both quite good then). Liquid twice. It didn’t matter who it was, Astralis brushed them all aside.

It’s a run that, for seven years now, has remained untouched. Vitality threatens to match it at IEM Cologne this year, and perhaps theirs would be more impressive in an undeniably more competitive era, but until then, it’s undeniable - Astralis’ three-peat is the greatest multi-tournament run in CS history.

Or is it?

The most successful least successful run

Well, yes, it is. But maybe not if you ask an NIP fan. If you were to ask one of them - as deluded as they tend to be - they might instead tell you that the greatest multi-Major run is owned by NIP, who made all five of the first five Major finals in CS:GO.

There is just one huge, glaring issue with that, though - they only managed to win one of them.

At the time, even though they never really managed to figure out the AWP role (thanks for being rubbish, Fifflaren and maikelele), NIP were incredible. Even as they became increasingly further removed from their 87-0 map winning streak, they were undeniable favourites, mostly down to the sheer fragging power of f0rest and GeT_RiGhT.

Nowadays, with the added context of the downturn of that core and the clown fiesta that followed, it’s easy to turn your nose up at what NIP actually accomplished during those five Majors. It’s a feat so impressive that the actual winners of the events are often forgotten just to give credit to what NIP managed to do.

Oh, and if you’re wondering: fnatic, Virtus.pro, NIP, LDLC, fnatic. With NIP’s eventual win also leading to the capture of the iconic photo of GeT_RiGhT and his Major trophy.

It’s with NIP that the idea of judging runs in Counter-Strike starts to become difficult. In football, where there are league systems, it’s easy to see if a team has accomplished something impressive over a number of seasons by looking at their point tallies; however, with CS, where everything is a knockout format, that becomes far more difficult.

In a world where there is only one winner, losers are often forgotten, but sometimes the run the loser went on to get to their eventual defeat is far more impressive. In the case of NIP, four eventual defeats are perhaps a bit much, especially when you consider just how good they were at the time, but what about other teams who have fallen at the final hurdle?

From 0-2 to the grand final

Take yourself back to the final CS:GO Major, and you will potentially find the greatest runners-up of all time. Mostly because they shouldn’t have been anywhere near the grand final at all.

For me, the Paris Major will always be special, because I got do on-site coverage for the TO running it, for many people, it was a huge disappointment. Most of the big boys didn’t even make it to the playoffs, and HEROIC, who were one of the favourites, fell to massive underdogs in the semis.

They may not have, though, if cadiaN didn’t have aggressive main character syndrome.

That team, GamerLegion, were only playing in their second Major, having fallen in the Challengers Stage of IEM Rio 2022 after infamously eliminating G2 from the RMR event. The team of siuhy, iM, isak, keoz, and acoR, therefore weren’t expected to do much, and it sounded about right when they soon found themselves 0-2 down in Paris.

But then they started to win. And then they didn’t stop winning.

Their run to the playoffs, outside of that first 0-2 game against MOUZ, was admittedly not all that impressive. They beat the likes of OG, fnatic, and Apeks, but none of these were real contenders (despite Apeks also making the top four), and their run might have gone differently had they faced someone better.

But as I said before - you can only beat the teams in front of you.

The playoffs were a slightly different story. They first faced Monte, who were supercharged by a BOROS that, at the time, was seemingly unearthing himself as the latest aggressive star to hit CS. That game ended 2-0, with iM dropping a 1.78 rating for the series and 34 kills in map one alone, sending them through with ease.

It should’ve then all come crashing down against HEROIC, but still, GamerLegion surged on. Even after losing map one, iM was relentless, and another 73 kills across three maps saw GamerLegion eliminate a favourite and become the biggest underdog to ever make it to the CS:GO Major final.

It was there, though, that the run did come to a very, very, sudden halt. But let’s face it - Vitality were never going to let that Major pass them by.

GamerLegion’s run, although it may not have come with a trophy at the end of it, was something no one in their right mind would have predicted. They’d been decent enough in tier two beforehand, sure, and iM was a good enough player, but 0-2 in Challengers all the way to the grand final? Ludicrous.

For my money, that and his 1.35 rating from the Legends Stage onwards should have netted iM the Major MVP. You can say what you want about about his performance in the final, but if you’re throwing the term “most valuable” at me, then you’re never going to convince me that ZywOo was more valuable to Vitality than iM was to GamerLegion. You just won’t.

The butterfly effect

GamerLegion aren’t the only impressive runners up, though, there’s one in far more recent memory that might be even more impressive.

You already know I’m talking about FaZe.

Now, to be clear - I don’t like FaZe all too much. I consider them to be unambitious, outdated, and in need of a whole new core. But f-ck me, they were fun in Budapest. Even if they would’ve been out in Stage 1 had history remembered he had a smoke.

From that point on, everything seemed to go right for FaZe, and maybe that’s what makes the run so good. jcobbb couldn’t help but multi-frag on pistol rounds, and was finding big impact on gun rounds, too. Twistzz and frozen were unstoppable, and broky? Well, for some reason, he remembered how to shoot people again. And thank f-ck he did.

It’s a run that will go down in legend, not just for how entertaining it was, but for how it made us feel as we approached each game. After their dance with death in Stage 1 and the 3-0 in Stage 2, it felt like FaZe might never lose again. Even when it got to the final, and we knew they would face off against Vitality, we still believed they might do it, collectively forgetting everything we knew about CS because we believed in the FaZe bullsh-t once more.

Not that the belief lasted very long, but at least we’ll always have Nuke.

Although it’s a run that will likely be soured by what will realistically be a poor 2025 for FaZe, where hindsight merchants soon write it off as a fluke, real knowers will know that during Budapest, FaZe achieved something that might never be seen again.

And that’s all that really matters.

The ultimate underdogs

What about the biggest outsiders to ever win a Major? And no, by that I don’t mean Outsiders, that team we all pretended wasn’t Virtus.pro.

For that, we have to go back to 2017, where everything was set for Astralis to go on to win their second Major both in that year and as an organisation. Way back in Kraków, the first PGL Major, where Gambit - and, to be fair to them, Immortals - shocked the world by going all the way to the final despite being the 15th and 10th ranked teams in the world at that time.

They even - to their credit - played out a great final, with a number of great plays from either side. Making it a real shame that the only one that’s really remembered is that f-cking nade from Dosia.

But even before that, Gambit’s run was incredibly impressive. They went 3-0 in the group stage, taking down a decent Mousesports team, fourth in the world G2, and a VP squad that was no longer at their best, but still capable of being dangerous on their day.

Then, in the playoffs, they first eliminated fnatic, before taking down tournament favourites Astralis in a thrilling three-map affair. The craziest part, even if fnatic were ranked lower at the time, is that Immortals may have been their easiest opponent in the playoffs, and they still handled them even after a dominant defeat in map one.

Every player had their moment, every star shone brighter than they ever had before and ever would again. It was Counter-Strike at its finest, and I think it will be a very long time before we ever see a team like them win it again.

The greatest of all time

And that all brings us to this, the greatest Major run of all time. Cloud9 in Boston.

Honestly, it’s undeniable. Back-to-back-to-back is great, but a run spanning multiple events feels like cheating. Being a huge underdog is cool, but it doesn’t matter if you don’t win it. And Gambit? Well, it honestly could’ve been them, but they didn’t quite go through what Cloud9 had to go through.

Cloud9, for those of you who have forgotten, began the Boston Major in the Challengers stage. They breezed through that stage with ease, losing just 21 rounds as they took down Envy, Sprout, and Mousesports that would go on to be one of the best teams of that year.

Then, in the Legends Stage, it all seemed to go wrong. Cloud9 were first beaten by G2, which was nothing to be ashamed of, but then fell 16-13 to Space Soldiers on Cobblestone. And although they had XANTARES, Space Soldiers were far from a good team. Once again, it seemed like NA would disappoint at a Major.

But Cloud9 defeated that perception of NA CS. They took down VP and Astralis, two incredibly strong European rosters known for solid performances during Majors. Then Vega Squadron, a young Russian team who had proved to be very dangerous for numerous top teams. They battled back from 0-2 to 3-2, winning three on the bounce despite a difficult run, and they did it without even breaking a sweat.

Of course, that wouldn’t have stopped them from sweating when they saw their quarter-final opponents. They were set to face G2, a French team who had already comfortably beaten them once during the event. But still Cloud9 pushed on, winning 2-0 and prevented the Frenchies from even reaching double digits on either map.

Their reward for this? A match against SK, a team they had historically struggled against and were always considered favourites thanks to the trio of fer, FalleN, and coldzera. But Cloud9 would win again, a 2-1 victory after kicking off the series with a dominant 16-3 win on Mirage.

That didn’t mean it would get easier, though, because the grand final would see them pitted against FaZe, and if their history against SK was dodgy, their history against FaZe was disastrous.

The final, to this day, is the greatest Major final to have ever been played. It began with a close game of Mirage, one that made it clear that this match wouldn’t be like the ones that had came before it. Cloud9 lost the opener, but they had made it clear they were up for the fight, and their performance on Overpass would see them take that fight all the way to map three, Inferno.

You don’t need me to tell you what happened on map three. You don’t need me to tell you about FaZe’s decision to go back to B, or Stewie’s AWP shots that subsequently held it. You don’t need me to tell you that Cloud9 had comeback from 15-11 to take it to overtime, or about any of the other clutches that followed. It’s one of the greatest moments in CS history, and I’m willing to bet you know where you were when you witnessed it.

It’s not just because of what happened during the Legends Stage that makes Cloud9’s run so impressive. It’s the teams they beat in order to lift the trophy. From the point they were 0-2 down, they faced four of the five teams ranked higher than them, and each one fell with a roar from the home crowd.

It was without a doubt the most difficult run any Major champion has had to endure, and regardless of what happened afterwards, it wasn’t a fluke. Cloud9’s Major win was a result of every player on their team turning up when it mattered most, and that meant they achieved a feat that no NA team ever had before, and perhaps ever will again.

This TL;DR was written by AN1MO. Art direction by NovaH.
Crash_ coded the email.

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