15.02.20246 min read

What happened at the IEM Katowice 2024 tournament?

IEM Katowice 2024, one of the biggest tournaments in Counter-Strike, ended last week. So we decided to put together an overview of the tournament stats just for you.

Why is IEM Katowice one of the biggest tournaments?

IEM, or Intel Extreme Masters, is the largest e-sports competition brand funded and hosted by Intel since 2006. The IEM World Championship in 2007 was held on the old CS 1.6, but it has been using CS:GO since 2013. HostedbyESL, this tournament is one of the two largest of their annual ESL Pro Tour tournaments. The other is IEM Cologne, which is held in the summer. The prize pool makes it probably one of the biggest tournaments after the major tournament hosted by Valve, which is worth $1,000,000.

What were the features and expectations of this year?

CS:GO is the first IEM Katowice tournament since CS2 was revamped, and 10 months after BLAST became the Paris Major , the most important tournament to redefine the ranks of teams this time was IEM Katowice. Judging by the tournaments from last year, it was anyone’s guess whether the previous IEM Katowice 2023 champion G2 Esports would reclaim their throne, or if FaZe Clan, Vitality, MOUZ, and Virtus Pro would take home the gold.

In addition to seeing how the teams are preparing a month before the first CS2 major PGL Copenhagen in 2024, the fact that TaZ, a former Virtus.Pro player joined the new G2 Esports team as a coach just a year ago and has attracted quite a bit of attention.

Even for the national team The MongolZ, the previous year’s IEM Katowice 2023 and IEM Cologne 2023 qualified from the Play-In stage to the main tournament, so this time it is the same as the desire to participate in the main tournament and play on stage to advance from the partial stage to the final. It was. But this, of course, is not so easy.

Tournament Play-In Stage

Of the matches that took place on the first day of the tournament, the first of which was the Polish Rebels Gaming team Cloud9, the delay saw Team Spirit beat the Apeks team by a 13-0 ratio, the last being The Mongolz team beating the FURIA team the Brazilian Slayers was confirmed. As a Team Spirit team, even if they got a pretty noisy player like donk a year ago into their team, the teams weren’t very commended on how successfully they would participate.

In match day 2 of the tournament, The MongolZ team lost their first map without yet being able to find the donk’s match point by matching Team Spirit, while Map 2 lost at the start on Ancient but still managed to make multiple Overtime because of the middle of the game but the final ice the losers waited. In this way, The Mongolz team went from one win to one loss to decide everything on Day 3. But for the other teams, GamerLegion beating Virtus.Pro was almost an upsetting match.

In the last day of the Play-In round, The MongolZ matched with ENCE, and they replaced 3 players a year ago and became the main core of the 9INE team. The MongolZ team had taken a pretty large lead on the first Mirage map but held their fists from the top 11-5 and thus won out of overtime. The slow map ended the match with a 5-13 win over Nuke, though it was 1-1, but the last Anubis didn’t gain. Senzu, who was recruited to the team in the fall for the MongolZ, managed to establish himself as a top fragger in his games, while he showed a pretty weak performance for Mzinho who had come down with the flu before the tournament.

Division matches

After the first two days of the tournament, Team Spirit’s donk had firmly established himself as a player to watch. NaVi easily came out first in their division by winning 2-1. Another highlight of the first day was the fact that Vitality dropped the team to the bottom table with a 2-1 win over the ENCE team.

After the previous day’s game, spectator fans were confident Team Spirit would make it to the finals, and they went straight to the fourth of the Sons, beating Complexity Team 2-0 and FaZe Clan 2-0, respectively. But ENCE were unwilling to take down G2 Esports and to directly elevate the tournament by defeating the Vitality team to the Heroic team. At the same time, Team Falcons proved their mettle by taking down NaVi for to take the final place in the division stage.

Final and Grand Finals

It was unfortunate that the two big teams, FaZe Clan and G2 Esports, who were expected to go head-to-head in this year’s finals, were matched in the very first game of the finals, but G2 Esports showed that preparation was not enough for the G2 Esports team by taking too few rounds. But on the other side, Team Falcons advanced to four of the boys defeating ENCE.

During this time, almost 90% of the audience were convinced that Team Spirit would win, while the rest thought “This is a stage match with an audience – they’re not ready”. Of course, FaZe Clan quickly dispatched MOUZ, while Team Falcons could do nothing to stop Team Spirit’s advance.

Team Spirit has made it to the grand final, once again proving that they’re top performers even in stage games. At this point, a few viewers were saying “This is the grand finale and they’re up against FaZe Clan – there’s no chance.” However, Team Spirit became the champions of the first big tournament of the year, winning 3 maps in a row in the Grand Final Best of 5 games. 17-year-old donk was also named the tournament’s MVP, setting an HLTV Rating 1.6 record compared to other competitions in Katowice.

After the match, there was only one name on people’s lips: donk. But, of course, Team Spirit would never have pulled off the win without the combined efforts of the entire team. Especially if the name wasn’t mentioned enough, the player who played a very big role was sh1ro. In any case, Katowice 2024 saw a dark horse beat the favorites and a new record set. But it remains to be seen on the RMR of the upcoming PGL Copenhagen Major tournament whether Team Spirit can continue their string of victories or if the other teams will figure out how to beat them.

AuthorTemujin Batbayar

Analyst from Ulaanbaatar specializing in CS2. Has competed in MESA tournaments, worked with Esports TV during the ESL Pro League, and reviewed both the PGL Major Antwerp 2022 and IEM Katowice 2024. Author of his own player evaluation metrics and known for accurate predictions. Has interviewed s1mple and ZywOo. In esports since the days of CS 1.3.