A history of BLAST Premier World Finals – by the numbers

Stats are the bread and butter of sports analysis, and it is always interesting to revisit tournament results in retrospect in search of a signal in the noise. With the partnered leagues ending this year, it was a great time to look back at the World Finals of the BLAST Premier circuit. Are partnered teams better than the rest? Can leaderboard qualifiers match those who earned a spot directly? What the heck is up with Heroic? I’ve crunched the numbers for you.

BLAST Premier World Finals – est. 2021

First, the baseline assumptions. I ignored the 2020 edition since it was an online-only affair, and it also used a different format and qualification system, but it’s worth noting that NAVI were the winners of that one. As for scoring, with the GSL-style group stage where only the bottom team is eliminated, seeding into a six-team playoffs, I translated the finishing placements into numbers like this:

Grand final winner – 1

Grand final loser – 2

Semifinal losers – 4

Quarterfinal losers – 6

Group stage eliminations – 8

So, the lower the average, the better the finishing positions. And there were some interesting and counterintuitive findings indeed.

While you might expect the big event winners to outperform those who have qualified through the leaderboard, the difference between those who relied on consistency and those with the highest of highs is marginal at best, with an average finish of 4.66 for the direct qualifiers and 4.83 for those with a leaderboard placement.

Digging more into the direct qualifiers and their performances, I was surprised to find that none of the Spring Final winners have won the World Final yet. In fact, Spring Final winners perform by far the worst, with a 5.3 average finish compared with 3.3 for the Fall Finals, 3.25 for the Major, and 4.4 for ESL Pro League winners. Even if you factor in the overlap in these title wins, I suppose this does make some sense, considering that it represents a strong performance in the early part of the year, long before the player break, aggressive antistratting, and potential roster changes. It’s not a good omen for Team Spirit this time around.

As for the other events that offer qualification, none of the solely Pro League winners have conquered the World Final yet, but NAVI did win Season 14 alongside the Stockholm Major and the Fall Finals on their way to their 2021 victory. In general, if you want to have a good shot at the World Final, you want to be a Major winner – two wins and a semifinal finish are the Major winners’ results, with the average brutally marred by Outsiders’ joint-last finish in 2022.

The state of play in 2024

This year, winning either IEM Katowice or Cologne offered direct invitations to the World Final. This is an interesting change but it offered no material impact. Spirit would have made it via the Spring Final win if nothing else, while Vitality had more than enough points to qualify via the leaderboard had they not got a spot through their Cologne win. In fact, this has been the pattern over the past years as well: the winners of either of these showpiece events would have easily qualified otherwise, too, and so high up the list that it would not have had an impact on the rest of the leaderboard placings, either.

While you might expect the rare non-partnered team to have done well in these CS2 matches – they, after all, had to prove their mettle elsewhere in a trial by fire rather than the pampered partners with much easier pathways to qualify – that has actually not been the case. The average finish of a partnered team is much higher than those who came in from the cold (4.42 vs 6). It turns out that if you discount Gambit’s runner-up finish in 2021, the five other non-partnered qualifiers only have a solitary semifinal appearance to their name.

(Two small caveats to this: Heroic only partnered with BLAST in 2022, so their 2021 run conferred by their Pro League win counts as a non-partnered joint-last finish, and Team Spirit is classified as an affiliate partner for 2024 for future reference.)

Heroic, incidentally, are by far the worst-performing team at the World Finals, going out it joint-last place three times out of three, and missing out entirely this time around. On the other end of the spectrum, NAVI are the only team to have made all four World Finals, and they always made it at least to the semis – a testament to how well-run the org has been in the Counter-Strike department. Apart from Heroic, two other teams boast three appearances in total – FaZe with an average finish of 2.5 but no outright win and G2 with a 4.33 average, boosted by their shock title win in 2022.

So what to expect from this year’s edition? Don’t put too much stock into the opening series, that’s for sure. In such a topsy-turvy Counter-Strike season, anything is possible. But if recent trends are to continue, then I’d guess NAVI and G2 for the title, with Aleksib’s merry men taking down yet another title in what’s been a stellar season for them so far, and a fitting sendoff for the BLAST Premier circuit as a whole.