A week ago, as Sam Bankman-Fried’s empire started to crumble into dust, the FT’s Alphaville section ran an exposé that shocked the world: While many of the revelations over the last week have stunned amateur and expert observers alike, this one did not; as both a former pro LoL coach…

The natural impulse when trying to understand different teams going into an international event in esports is to look to the big differences between teams (and generally, by extension, regions). That’s obviously not totally inaccurate — the easiest storylines are built on differences and the ‘clash of styles’, after all…

A thought inspired by a combination of too much VALORANT and too much NBA content lately: how efficient are pro team Operator buys in VALORANT in terms of kill conversion (i.e. KPR per Operator holds/buys)? To start out with: yes, there are problems with KPR for measuring the impact of…

This is how reliant every team in EU, NA, and at Master’s is on first bloods to win rounds. The higher the final number, the less reliant they are. Interested? Read on. The relationship between first bloods and round differential is something that I’ve been curious about for a few…

Economy in VALORANT is very deliberately and specifically designed around the two main ‘rifles’ — the Vandal and the Phantom, both priced at 2900 credits. This is the same as in certain similar games, and the reason for this is because the rifles are designed so that, with perfect play…

Back just after beta, I wrote an economy guide for Valorant. (I mostly wrote about the first few months of competitive Valorant on here, but there’s one or two theory pieces prior to those early tournaments). It’s one of the few pieces on this Medium that’s still pretty consistently trafficked…

UPDATE, November 27th: EU First Strike used a similar model to NA/other regions, but not identical; as best we can tell, seeding applied for the teams from the first qualifier, and then each was randomly assigned one of the teams from the second qualifier. …

As you read this, the bracket for the finals of First Strike: Europe is in the process of being set. …

1) G2 still have a long way to go (but ardiis is still the best player in Europe). So. G2 won. There are going to be enough panegyrics to what G2 did at this tournament that honestly, it seems like the more valuable contribution to the discourse (trademark copyright) here is in general to actually pull everyone’s collective neck in a bit. Did they perform well here? Yes…