Every Last Chance Qualifier in the VALORANT Champions Tour has had its own story, but one LATAM player is taking the Americas tournament by storm—even though his team failed to register a single win in the regular season.
KRÜ Esports are once again making an unexpected run, catching fire exactly when they needed to as they battle to qualify for Champions 2023 in Los Angeles. Their star duelist Angelo “keznit” Mori is topping almost all stats thanks to his standout Jett and Raze play, helping the team not only earn their first win in 2023 but blitz through the upper bracket finals with a three-game winning streak.
KRÜ entered the LCQ as the tenth seed, meaning they would potentially have to play the most matches out of all the teams to make it to Champions. It all began with a convincing win against MIBR, closing out both maps without losing more than eight rounds on either. Keznit, alongside longtime teammate Nicolas “Klaus” Ferrari, led the charge in that series. Impressively, keznit was the second-best player in the lobby, which is statistically his worst match of the tournament heading into the upper bracket finals.
In the next series against FURIA, keznit put up some unbelievable numbers in KRÜ’s 2-1 win. Ending the series with 71 kills, 19 more than the next-best in the lobby, keznit showed no sign of slowing down. He would finish with an absurd 29-kill performance on Bind to move forward in the bracket.
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On July 17, KRÜ had a chance to upset regional rivals Leviatán to secure their upper bracket future, and once again, keznit rose to the occasion. While it wasn’t nearly as chart-topping a performance as in the FURIA series, he led the lobby in kills for the second time in three games with 44 kills.
After helping the team secure a 2-0 series win and a future matchup against Cloud9, keznit has been the best player of the tournament by raw statistics, and it’s no contest. His aggressive Raze gameplay has him leading in first bloods, and his top-tier aim with the Vandal makes him nigh unstoppable to his foes.
So far, keznit is number one in match rating at 1.46 and ACS at 306.4 according to VALORANT stats site vlr.gg. On top of that, he’s first in KAST at 84 percent, K/D at 1.56, and damage per round at 198.5. He’s also proving himself a valuable end-of-round figurehead with a 36 percent clutch win ratio. He’s both the best player currently in the tournament and the biggest riser. In the regular season, he put up some high stats but couldn’t lead his team to victory. Now, he’s fragging and leading his team to victory, a key staple of KRÜ’s previous runs.
Of course, these stats are subject to change as KRÜ faces Cloud9 next, but KRÜ is prone to runs this like this. They proved they had this sort of form in them at Champions in 2021, eliminating Sentinels and Fnatic. Two years later, the roster has gone from a winless team to one of the hottest teams in the world thanks to keznit’s run in this LCQ.
KRÜ faces off against Cloud9 on July 18, as the second match of the day after Sentinels versus Leviatán.
