History will be made during the final CS:GO Major via the BLAST Paris Major, but it was already made during the qualification RMR competition. The current champion will not defend their championship for the first time ever.
The Virtus Pro roster that stunned so many CS:GO fans with their miraculous title run at the IEM Rio Major in 2022 did something even more shocking today, losing in decisive fashion to mousesports in an elimination best-of-three that ended their chances of making it to Paris. How VP lost was most surprising; they found almost no success on their T-sides on both Mirage and Ancient, and had no answer for the blisteringly hot mousesports duo of torzsi and frozen.
In that final decisive loss against mousesports, VP made a surprise roster move, bringing n0rb3r7 back into the starting roster from the bench and sidelining recent signee KaiR0N-. It’s currently unclear what prompted the change.
While it is only the fourth-ever CS:GO Major to utilize the RMR qualifier system, which doesn’t guarantee teams Major spots based on previous Major performances, it is the first time that a previous champion has failed to make it back to the next such event. The result must sting for the VP organization itself, as the roster won the IEM Rio Major without the VP branding, competing under the name ‘Outsiders’ due to the previous ownership’s ties to the Russian government and subsequent sanctions in Europe an North America. Both BLAST and ESL had only just lifted their sanctions towards VP in the past couple weeks.
VP’s time in CS:GO is not completely over yet: they still have IEM Rio 2023 and IEM Dallas coming up in the next couple of months.