Wednesday, May 23 – 2pm local time
Virtus.pro has endured a rough year so far, even having to make a roster change after years of conservatism. The team’s only notable result in 2018 to date was a second-place finish at V4 Future Sports Festival Budapest. The replacement of TaZ with MICHU has certainly led to some improvements, but there is a lot of work to do if Virtus.pro wants to rejoin the upper echelons of professional CS:GO.
AVANGAR is a second-tier team with little to no experience at the highest level of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Perhaps its most important result this year was its participation at ELEAGUE Major: Boston 2018, where it finished 17th out of a total of 23 teams.
Virtus.pro is definitely favorite to win, but it will have to perform at a decent level. Betway puts the odds at $1.60 to $2.20 in favor of Virtus.pro, giving AVANGAR a lot of respect and clearly taking into account VP’s poor form and inconsistency.
Betting prediction: Virtus.pro to win
Wednesday, May 23 – 5pm local time
After several months of disappointments, SK Gaming parted ways with TACO and then brought in one of Cloud9’s best players, Stewie2K. However, the language barrier between him and the rest of the Brazilian roster quickly became apparent as SK Gaming suffered crushing defeats at the hands of much weaker opponents. The team finished ninth-12th at DreamHack Masters Marseille 2018, 13th-16th at Intel Extreme Masters XIII Sydney and then finally had its first decent result in four months, finishing fifth-sixth at the ESL Pro League Season 7 Finals. Right now, SK Gaming is clearly on an upward trend and is slowly but surely recovering its former strength. So just like Bitcoin after it’s hit a bottom, SK will likely rise pretty fast in the weeks to come.
On the other side, Gambit Esports used to be a pretty strong CIS team, finishing ninth-11th at ELEAGUE Major: Boston 2018. The team went on a steep decline after that result but has recently resurfaced with good runs at the DreamHack Masters (third-fourth) and DreamHack Open Tours 2018 (third-fourth).
All things considered, this will likely be a very close match. SK Gaming is still slightly favored, however, having defeated important teams such as NiP in its last CS:GO event. Betway puts the odds at $1.35 to $2.95 in favor of the Brazilians, seeing a much bigger gap between these teams than is actually the case. Based on this, you may want to bet a smaller amount on the underdog here and cover the upset, as Gambit Esports has at least a 40 per cent chance to win this match.
Betting prediction: SK Gaming to win
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