Evil Geniuses’ CS:GO team are receiving flack on social media today after ESL handed them a Local Hero direct invite to the $250,000 IEM Dallas tournament in May despite their awful record in the past 30 days.
Autimatic, Vincent “Brehze” Cayonte, Sanzhar “neaLaN” Iskhakov, Jadan “HexT” Postma, and Jerric “wiz” Jiang have a 5-13 record since the 2023 season started and most of their wins came against domestic North American teams such as Demon Time, REIGN, and Mythic in the open qualifier for the BLAST Paris Major RMR, which they failed to qualify for and will consequently miss the first CS:GO Major of the year.
“Local hero invite what the fuck,” one Redditor said. “More like local failure lol,” another Redditor replied. The Reddit thread and the official ESL announcement on Twitter are full of fans dunking on EG for receiving yet another chance to play in a tier-one CS:GO tournament despite their subpar form in 2023.
To make matters worse, EG as an organization has had almost no support from the community since its senior director of gaming and performance Lindsey “GamerDoc” Migliore called out casters in January after the team upset Heroic at BLAST Premier Spring Groups and said EG had built a talent pipeline with the Blueprint project in a tweet that has been memed ever since.
Related: Liquid CS:GO star NAF slams Evil Geniuses management: ‘I would be an idiot to join this team’
EG is one of the organizations partnered with ESL in CS:GO and its team is currently 25th in the world in the tournament organizer’s own ranking, behind other North American-based teams such as ATK, Nouns Esports, and paiN Gaming. EG also recently came in last place in ESL Pro League season 17’s Group A after one-sided losses to Cloud9, Eternal Fire, and IHC and seems nowhere close to getting out of their slump unless major changes take place.
IEM Dallas will run from May 29 to June 4, which leaves EG with a lot of time to at least try to prepare for the tournament and attempt to salvage their first half of the year.
