Virtus.Pro won Flashpoint and earned almost the most this season

A paradoxical situation happened quite recently in the vastness of online CS: GO tournaments. While most of the spectators closely followed the DreamHack Masters Winter final, in which Mousespots and Astralis met, Virtus.Pro simultaneously became the champions of the second season of the Flashpoint league, beating OG with a score of 2: 1. Moreover, our "bears" came back because they gave up the first card and lost their advantages.

We can say that VP went to victory through a rather difficult path. The team ended up in the league not as one of the founding clubs, which paid the $ 2 million entry fee, but became members through qualification. Moreover, the team went through the open qualifiers, because no one invited them to the closed one. There she had certain problems with four opponents, but in the closed one, apparently, the "bears" were able to find their game, which became their key to further victories.

As a result, VP showed almost perfect Counter-Strike at this tournament. During the qualifiers, they did not give up almost a single meeting, and during the main stage of the tournament they did not fly out of the upper bracket. The team suffered the first and only defeat in the tournament, again, from the very same OG, when they played for the first place in the group. At the same time, there were no defeats in the playoffs, and moreover, such serious opponents as Fnatic, BIG and Mad Lions, who held the Flashpoint championship belt after the first season, were sent to the lower bracket.

Despite the fact that VP lost the first map to their opponent in the final, their level of play on Train and Inferno was enough for no one to have any doubts that they would become the deserved champions of this tournament. Especially the majority of spectators and experts noted Train, in which we saw a great attack and many unforgettable moments.

As a result, VP received as much as $ 500,000 in just the second season of Flashpoint, which can be called a truly fabulous sum at the time of the dominance of online tournaments. By comparison, Astralis earned only $ 346,000 this season, while NaVi earned $ 551,000 over the same period. We can say that the organizers were definitely not stingy when they announced the insurance fund.

At the same time, if we consider the league in terms of audience interest, it turned out to be almost a failure. The final of such a major tournament was watched by so many people that their number barely doubled the number of viewers on an ordinary stream of Simple, and in terms of the number of viewers, the final was not even in the top five most watched games.

We hope that next season the organizers will make some decisions like pumping the media or adding some unusual formats to the tournament, which will allow to gather more viewers from the screens and make such a large event really pay off. So far, the financial investments in the tournament have hardly paid off.