After a two year wait, the PGL Major Stockholm marks the return of the highest level of competition in CS:GO. Adam Boothe previews some of the unique and interesting proposition bets available on Pinnacle. Read on to find out more.
This article will run through every market on offer from Pinnacle under the ‘Player Specials’ and ‘Team Futures’ sections of the PGL Major Stockholm. We won’t get into every single line, but I will provide a brief overview of what the respective offer is and some general points to consider.
First up, ‘A Brazilian Team To Win the Major’. In past years, Gabriel "FalleN" Toledo - the Brazilian Godfather - and his teams Luminosity Gaming and SK Gaming were some of the scariest contenders at most events between 2016 and 2017. They were able to win both the MLG Major Columbus and ESL One Cologne titles in 2016; however, in the five years since that period, six Majors have passed and a Brazilian team has yet to even reach the finals of a Major. That being said, they were not far off. For all the criticism they have received since 2016, teams that "FalleN" has played for have reached the playoffs in six Majors and reached the final four teams in four of them.
While there are four Brazilian teams competing in this event, three of them are starting in the New Challengers stage. Theses three teams, GODSENT, Sharks Esports, and paiN Gaming, are not favoured to make it through to the next round given the significant depth of the competition in the first round of the tournament. So, for all intents and purposes, the market is really a question of whether FURIA will win the Major. The price is 9.5* for ‘Yes,’ and 1.03* for ‘No’. Even if you are a Brazilian fan interested in throwing something on your favourite team, I would suggest backing FURIA in the ‘To Win Outright’ market instead of ‘A Brazilian Team To Win The Major’ given the circumstances mentioned.
The next market to check is ‘A Team to Win 16-0’. If you want to have fun and take a shot at the complete obliteration of one top team against another, this market could interest you.However, the pricing here also doesn’t leave ‘No’ as an enjoyable experience and looking at the price on ‘Yes’ we can clearly see it is paying 11.5*. This is not like tennis where a top-tier talent will serve straight set losses over the course of a grand slam event. In 688 matches played at the Major tournaments thus far, we have a singular 16-0 map score line - when Astralis defeated MIBR at the London Major in 2018. It was Dust2 and MIBR’s Terrorists planted the bomb three times over those first 15 rounds. Two members of the MIBR roster at the time, namely the two superstars ‘FalleN’ and Marcelo "coldzera" David, were both victims of another 16-0 on this very same map only two years prior. If you wish to look for patterns in the stars then perhaps you will see a sign for another 16-0 this year; however, I can think of some other markets which could be more enjoyable for a better payout.
Our next market is one which is being offered on a number of head-to-head matches. It is for which of the two teams in the selection will get the ‘Most Kills in a Map’. This is quite self-explanatory, but just a couple general points: Overtime is included and not all teams get to play the same number of maps. Therefore, you need to balance the probability of a team to both play matches that they are not going to win or lose too heavily and an increased likelihood for them to play more maps than their opponent and therefore have more opportunities to get more kills in a singular map. For instance, both GODSENT and Sharks Esports could end their tournament run after the opening stage; however, GODSENT could go 1-3 playing eight maps while Sharks esports could go 0-3 playing just four.
The ‘Team to Play the Most Maps’ market is similarly constructed; however, in this scenario you do not have to worry about the length of a singular map as the focus is on the series. Teams which have the strongest map pools are not necessarily going to get to play the most maps, but that is the best place to start as they will set themselves up to go furthest in the tournament against similarly talented teams with weaker pools.
Moving over to the Players Specials, we have an extensive board of head-to-head matchups between many of the world's biggest superstars. At the top of the board is ‘Highest ADR’. ADR is the acronym for ‘Average Damage per Round’. While kills are a critical stat, damage can be a more comprehensive look at the varied skill set of a player. Damage includes not only assists, but any deduction of health points dealt to an opposing player, including bullet or grenade damage. A critical point in deciding how to attack this market is how well you believe a particular player’s teammates are going to perform. The less work your player in question has to do, the lower his ADR will be despite having impeccable K/D. So keep in mind that it can be a very volatile stat over just a few matches and that might be all a team gets to play.
The next player market up is ‘HLTV Rating’. While we know most of what goes into it the rankings, not all has been disclosed and certainly not the weighting. While this does not mean you cannot find an ‘edge’ on two particular players in a head-to-head, it is a difficult job attributing meaningful outcomes when you do not know the basis for the outcome. In other words, with the kills market you know that a kill occurs when a player performs the last point of damage to an enemy player. However, what if a kill was assigned to any person who did any amount of damage but we did not have the rules on how the game registered the outcome? The weighting would, of course, be absent as would the logic. That is not to say that the HLTV Rating 2.0 is illogical, but rather that we do not have the basis to know the foundational factors that comprises it so it might be best to sidestep this particular market.
‘Least deaths in the Tournament’ is not a market I ever recall seeing before; however, it is possible it has been offered and I simply missed it previously. When I saw this title, the first thing I did was look for a line on Dzhami "Jame" Ali. Sure enough, the esports traders were on the ball and served up a price for "Jame", which is 2.21* against Gambit’s Dmitry "sh1ro" Sokolov. Unfortunately, the head-to-head matchup is not a great one given Gambit are second in the Outright market to win. That being said, for any player offered on this market, it will have far more to do with the amount of matches played and lost, than how many rounds one of them happens to save. So, this particular line on "Jame" might not be the best to engage with.
Finally, we have reached the ‘To Score an Ace’ market. An ‘ace’ occurs when a single player kills all five opponents in one round of a map. Now, typically for an event with this many matches we will get upwards of eight aces over the tournament. An ace requires opportunity more than anything. Star players are typically put in better positions to let their aim go to work. Looking over the full list of 18 players, there is only one name who is being priced as more likely to attain an ace than to not do so, the one-and-only Oleksandr "s1mple" Kostyliev. Every other player, even last year’s number one in the world Mathieu "ZywOo" Herbaut, is more likely not to clear all five opponents one after another.
It is possible we could see some more markets pop up in the final countdown to the event. As we return to LAN in increasing frequency we will see more of these novelty markets crop up. So even if you are not sure how to best engage with the markets for this PGL event, hold on to any research you do to better inform future bets. Best of luck and enjoy this historic tournament!
*Odds are subject to change.
