One of the longest map win streaks in VALORANT history has been broken at Champions 2023 today, with fan favorites EDG on the losing side of Split for the first time in just under two years.
In their first match of the premier VALORANT tournament, facing off against Giants Gaming, their opponents picked Split against them and it led to the best map of the tournament so far. In the end, the Chinese team couldn’t keep up their streak up, losing 15-13 despite some heroics from Wang “nobody” Senxu.
Split, in particular, is such a tough map to get a consistent win streak on for multiple reasons. Firstly, it is considered a defense-sided map, meaning one bad streak of defensive rounds can create a tough hill to climb. On top of that, it was removed from competitive play from June 2022 to Jan. 2023, with some changes added to better suit ranked and pro play.
Despite those changes, EDG’s dominance regionally and recent success internationally has allowed them to be undefeated on Split since 2021.
So, how did they lose it to Giants in their first game of Champions 2023? The simple answer is they were heavily counter-stratted, with Giants setting up a lot of trap plays around mid to punish any lurkers while focusing Zheng “ZmjjKK” Yongkang at every opportunity. Most rounds were defined by smoking off where they think ZmjjKK would be, flashing past it to push him back, and potentially using more utility to kill him.
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That led to a 9-3 lead for Giants in the first half, though EDG tried their best to reawaken the curse. The final two rounds of the second half seemed to be easy wins for Giants until an EDG player managed to clutch the round with four kills back-to-back.
Skye player nobody was the key player for EDG to both help them get to overtime from round 23 and clutch round 26 to keep them in the map.
Alas, the strategies Giants applied were never truly countered, as the rest of the EDG team were stunted, and Giants went on to win 15-13, but not without some sweat building.
As for EDG, their Split record is 20-1 since Aug. 2021. As much as it is important to have specific maps to go to for consistent success, EDG is focusing more on two more important aspects of the game: winning VALORANT games and proving their success regionally and at Masters Tokyo run weren’t flukes.
