A *Brief* History of Choking in Counter-Strike

I just finished up another rewatch of the wire goat no Sopranos is the goat Big T hey where my Gaba come where's my Gaba goou what we're going to talk about today has to do with the fact that at the end of The Wire there's this one scene that reminded me of something I've said about nathany and that was from uh Mara Daniels okay and Mara says the tree that doesn't Bend breaks Cedric and that reminded me of something that I've been saying about nathanie and all of these interviews and I don't know if it was just my core memory of watching the wire so many times the moment where I saw an interview from nathany where he said we don't care what our opponents are doing we don't even think about it we play our own game they don't really exist I respect my opponents but I don't care about them and then what happens they go on to lose they crumble and they get crushed that has been the storyline for some reason in modern times these Russian players what's going on it's these Russian players and it's carrian and we'll get to that in a second but this video is going to be about the history of chokers now another reason that I'm making this video is because I've recently accused team spirit of choking and people have gotten mad at me about that because if you look at the games at Spirit of one it's a vast majority if you look at their win rates it's very high if you look at their performances and their overall stats on average individually they're all excellent now that being said if you watched ztics play on stage at the Copenhagen major you remember when Chad said this it doesn't look like he's up for it doesn't look like he's up for it at all 12 seconds yeah there's just no chance he he's out of his depths mate oh no I mean pick up the bomb they're going to surely double Peak you you got to plant you got to PL oh not like that 15 secure for face clamp it's so tough to see a player get swallowed by the stage like this it's so tough to watch think about all these clutch situations that he's found himself in he's found some contributions late sure but in any of these situations where you know needs to show a bit of shine a bit of Polish he's just looked well out of his depths and you know what to the inexperienced eye they watch ztics go and clear all these angles on the retake and they think well he looks sharp right he's doing what he's supposed to be doing but to the experienced eye you're watching ztics clear these angles and think his brain is off right now he is not thinking about Counter-Strike he's not thinking about counter- strike at all he's literally thinking about how do I not embarrass myself how do I ignore the fact that there's 15,000 people staring back at me right now how do I reconcile the idea that we won katab in such dominant fashion everyone thought we were going to win the major I told myself I was going to win the major and for some reason I'm shaking in my shoes that's what ztics was thinking when he was going for this retake and it's it's very powerful imagery if you know the game and I I don't even mean to gatekeep that I would say most people understand what this means look at the bomb timer look at the angles he's clearing and then look at the player that ztics is right because if you were a bad player then making this play is just part for the course right it's just you kind of suck but zonx is a great player right the only thing that's broken ztics is the stage the only thing that's broken ztics is big matches like this right and speaking of choking I would love to choke myself on a pair of ason they're just so amazing I just would like to put them in my mouth because I ason in my mouth put them in my mouth they're so delicious they're amazing code launders you get a discount okay so make sure you head on over to asone doio they are making this YouTube channel possible in my very busy schedule between all the [ __ ] that I'm doing I want to thank them very much they're an awesome company they think about CS they're Danish obviously so you know that they make the best headphones in this game I promise you I stake my rep on it okay anyone who see me in person if you got something to say about asone buy a pair let me know they go beyond any headphones you've used I promise you that back to the video so as I mentioned choking is something that happens sometimes and it's only recorded for those big games when teams who are expected to win don't pull it off seldom is the case that you actually see someone fess up to the fact that they choked because it's sort of in embarrassing to say that I choked right that I just crumbled under the pressure it feels you feel like pathetic almost right like I was too scared to fight that guy so I ran away that's what it feels like to admit that you choked now later we'll find out that you can admit the choking and still end up winning in the long run and actually the path to Victory might be a little bit more long and arduous and complicated and full of obstacles mentally but it starts with admitting and just because you ignore it doesn't mean that you're going to be able to overcome it so anyway let's head back to 2013 when we saw the first choke happen in 2013 nip choked in the grand finals of the very first CSO major that's right nip the team who were 87 and zero on land Maps one in a row a legendary win rate a legendary record in fact this was a team that was challenged by ason dragons challenged by very games and eventually that streak did come to an end but they had a reputation at this point right they were by Far and Away the best team in this new game and they were born of two very legendary players Getti and Forest coming from 1.6 and joining up with elite players from source and fryberg and existant ffen and they were born of legendary 1.6 players in g r and Forest who are considered the best of all time and exist as well and the two Source players that came in in fryberg and ffen and they were created to be the best team to start off perfectly just like fairy games were but they beat out that head-to-head rival and became the best team and the most feared team and the most impossible to beat no matter how close you got no matter what you did there was always something that happened it was called nit magic check out this incredible moment from exist where he pulls off a 1v3 and they avoid elimination at dream hack summer okay this is where NP magic started to become sort of synonymous with nip in every single game they played no matter how close you got to beating them they pulled off rounds like this this is not going to happen team X are about to 1611 nip and send them home before the playoffs they are going out of groups this is an undoable situation if teamx actually managed to fail this is going to be a big mistake because it's for a long Plan Three Guys on long oh let's see goes down though they're going to go in here fireberg goes for the diffuse he has to get it right now if not then they lose he goes with is he going to get it oh my God you know looking at this round now he put his head down and he diffused the bomb but when you were there at the time this was just like it was like uncanny like you felt like you were watching David Blaine and you knew the trick was coming and he still pulled it off anyway right like oh he's levitating like literally they could it's like they could do no wrong that's what nip magic was so this is a team that's basically in nominal all right but even nip who did not go on to have a history of choking at least not not like the record show they did actually end up winning one out of four csgo grand finals but the first one that they played in they were the heaviest favorites to win of probably any major to ever come okay the very first Grand finals nip were destined to be able to pull this off and they ended up losing to fanatic and you guys may or may not have remembered this moment from devil walk as he pants himself on stage because he promised to do so if they ended up winning this game was unbelievable to see in person because you know looking back it was the very first choke that we ever witnessed and it was the first SE CS go major so again this is the only way that you can have a choke the circumstances have to be so great and it's not that nip weren't still a great team and that they couldn't continue to be great and make de runs and win more and eventually win their major which was an amazing moment but in this game you could see clear as day it was about the pressure fanatic were not even a top eights team to be able to win the major no one was saying the team nam ftic in csgo at all pronax was not a household name nobody knew about flusher and the powers that some these players had as we would see moving forward it wasn't even close I know stretch of the imagination were fanatic supposed to be champions of the first csgo major and I always pin this to the fact that this is the first time that nip were exposed to such levels of notoriety right this team nip had a mcnp burger at McDonald's okay even when get right goes out today in Sweden he is the most famous man on the street all right he you cannot walk down the street without get right getting hounded by people if you're in Stockholm as a North American we can't relate to this when devices in copen everybody recognizes him we don't have that level of celebrity for Esports in North America it's real over there so yeah the pressure was actually too much it was one moment we finally saw where NP magic didn't come through it was cool to watch but it was also shocking this was something that you you couldn't replicate and had to be NP beating themselves moving forward just a year you have something bubbling up okay and that's device Dupri and that ziix and they playing on this team together on dignitas in 2014 and this team is good right and they're led by fetish and even me as a spectator back then you know I kind of knew about them I didn't really think of them as like they're going to win an event but they started making deep runs and we already saw very early on that device was one of the best players in the world 2014 2015 you've got theice who's playing on dignitas and he goes over switches jerseys into TSM switches jerseys into astralis all the while is playing Amazing okay now I want to say that device is having great stats versus a lot of his competition even in these early years choking again is sometimes something that goes beyond the stats when you look at device's Stats they were great but look at him openly joking about the fact that he was choking while he was playing with fetish you know after he had to take the op from fetish because fetish wasn't a good enough oper and then he went from a star rifler to the oper or when carrian came on the team and they formed a strawless together and they really tried to stamp the mark of Denmark on Counterstrike early on now astralis also though had a choking problem and a lot of this of course we're talking about the goat choker here we're talking about the Gizzy gobbler okay we're talking about the grapefruit challenge Champion okay carrian baby this guy has had the most amazing chokes of anybody all right and I can say that laughing because he's obviously also had such incredible career wins he's got the trophy sliding bar he's played and called for most of the best talent in the entire games history he's also developed so much talent he's won so much with stand-ins and everything but he's also given away way two majors to teams that we would now consider flukes and when this happened to Cloud9 I'm going to be honest with you I was mad when this was called a fluke but if you look at the definition of a fluke this is Cloud9 who went on to not win anything they were top six coming into Boston they played against FaZe in the grand finals and FaZe were the number one team in the world it was FaZe with Olaf it was FaZe with Guardian it was FaZe with NI and carrian and there was just no chance that they could lose this to Cloud9 no chance and I even talked to Stewie after the game in person and I remember Stewie saying I think they choked and I said n no you just destroyed them you know I think it was both to be fair they did beat three top five teams on their run oh my God here's lers how can I talk about this run without trying to make Cloud9 look good it was legit run okay it was actually in fact the hardest run in history anyways when you watch carrian get up on stage for the grand finals and play against Cloud9 you see Nico in the Dumbo Tron after that game is over when they were up 15 to 11 on Inferno and went to OT and lost and you see the confetti on him with his hand like this on the back of the chair and you see that thousand M stare and you see what happened with carrian getting cut after that moment and you see carrian up on stage at pgl Copenhagen once again getting completely decimated by a team that he was much higher ranked than carrian in both instances choked and if you want to debate that you're allowed to I just find it hard to believe that anybody would deny it for carrian or Nico or anybody on this team in 2018 to deny that they choked would be to say that they were somehow the worst team you know who was better on that day obviously when a team chokes they run into time pressure they can't hold their gun anymore they can't hit the head shot they get the spray they get 60 damage they're a little so of the rotation that they know like the back of their hand they're late to the sight they get smoked out they don't want to get information because they're scared of being aggressive they're reframing everything in their head they're teaching themselves the same things that they already know how to do live they're spending moments in a Live Match as professional players on the top ranked teams in the world retelling themselves how to swing how to spray how to be confident that's choking and that's what we saw in both of those cases with carrian and this is the same reason that he got cut from astralis early on and when glaive came in of course he took a team that made sense and the one thing they were missing was the ability to have clutch calls and at Atlanta 2017 the other major I love talking about 7 to 12 comeback this was the comeback that carrian was incapable of thinking about trying to call for astralis in their toughest moments when it came to carrian later on in anter 2022 I'll never forget this [ __ ] round in library with the silenced M4 holding the arch cross getting his three kills carrian overcoming choking when it mattered the [ __ ] most in 2022 it was such a beautiful moment okay it was truly amazing watching somebody like that overcome some could say the hardest challenge in the entire game being your best self on the big stage in the Grand Final versus a tier one team in front of a massive crowd that was carrian in antor Grand finals then what [ __ ] happened after that PG Copenhagen versus na'vi this could be three Majors for carrian and who knows the timeline if he stays on phase cuz he doesn't get caught because he doesn't have the nerves what kind of Cs history we'd have so what are some other examples I mean the reason that I brought up this quote to kick things off the tree that doesn't Bend breaks nathy man coming out of 2020 and a lot of the teams who are coming out of 2020 big was a number one team in the world Fury was number one team in North America it was Cloud9 it was heroic these were the top five teams you know coming out of 2020 not playing in their land matches but then we get on stage and we see heroic lose to Outsiders in the Rio Grand finals but more importantly we see Cloud n who should have won this damn major right they should have been in the grand finals of this major they lost to Dexter mous do you remember this and I think overall shirro was one of the only rays of sunshine when it came to Cloud9 back then and some of these runs in some of their choke games but even shirro had one or two moments where he obviously completely disappeared when we talk about him playing an Anor versus Imperial obviously amazing game by Fallen okay the professor insane overpass match one of the best maps ever played at a major for qualification to get the top eight amazing stuff from Imperial but let's face facts look at map 2 and three remember Mirage Shiro everyone on this team getting absolutely decimated most of this is definitely naphy right we know that the quality of players is there but you can see it right from the interviews okay and this is something different with nathany compared to some of our previous examples so I think napan and that Cloud9 had an excellent system but when I hear naan have interviews like this in terms of Vitality today what do you think of where they are at because they've started to improve their map Pool their performances look better as a a team do you feel like you can match them if that whole team lot comes up in a in like the full performance I mean Vitality it's a good team and the what I can hope that we will show the good game both of us and then we will see who is better that's [Music] it you know what's coming next you know that they're either going to destroy their opponents or they're going to fall apart and they're just going to freeze you know that that's coming the branch that doesn't Bend breaks that's nathany and I kept saying that a player with a great system and a great team and a great composition and achieved amazing things out of 2020 but when it came to those very few games that were very important you could still see the choke you had to watch the game though because when you go back and look at the stats they'll always lie to you and when it comes to individuals as well we've got simple who three out of the four major finals he played in he was terrible didn't do anything was a face it major supposed to be his time completely crumbled when it came to liquid in his Grand Final they let that massive comeback happen he got a bunch of kills and then just stopped and then they lost fell apart that's our goat you know Counter-Strike doesn't have a Michael Jordan we've had very flawed goats okay we got zwu who's the master of stats but he's even having problems in Grand finals right now his Playoff stats excellent the fact he's one a major done but the fact the quality of the Run isn't there the fact that when he plays against the top team in the matchup that matters the most Elimination Game even if it's only the very final map at Dallas where is he when you need him it's only these few games where you see the choke happen you have even players like stown who had amazing statistics he was the best player statistically for Heroic when it came to their important games or elimination matches and playoffs for Heroic he was one of the biggest land drop offs in terms of rating 10 to 15 down quietly going missing right it's very quiet when this happens you still see the player that you've noticed 90% of the time they slightly miss a spray here and there critical rounds you don't get many chances to be great I think that's basically the point of this again we're only scrutinizing teams and players who are expected to win entire events and so when you criticize them it just goes to show you that the very few Champions that we have I I want to say like Stewie and glaive who have done an incredible job of closing out winning got the trophies already even if they become washed afterwards you got to respect the fact that they've done that you know what I mean because lots of people get close lots of people look extremely promising even someone like Don looks like we're going to get 10 years of him at the top level and maybe we will maybe we really will but at the same time it could be a Kirby and we only get one maybe we don't get any and they disappear entirely and we never see it it could be so this is the final boss for many great stories in Counterstrike and I think it's a really interesting thing to look at and when it comes to Spirit these days they're the final team in this video that I wanted to talk about because they're the team in these interviews where I mean these guys are going to die of irony poisoning if they keep doing interviews like this where they just keep joshing around pretending like they don't give a [ __ ] and then completely crumbling under the lights all right I don't want to see a team like this make a roster move because they're scapegoating their worst player like Cloud9 did with inter I don't want to see this team pretend that they can ignore a problem until it solves itself I want to see them doing this and joking about choking and then getting up on stage and being the team that they know they can be because they can be great spirit have the composition to be the best team in the world they have shirou and Don they have Chomper who's been waiting for this chance they have ztics who has so much future potential they need to get their mental right and they need to stop fall following in Na's footsteps okay and everybody needs to learn from the chokers in history to understand what their fate is going to be if they keep pretending that they're better than that because being nervous only means that you care it doesn't mean that you're a coward it doesn't mean that you're weak it means that you want it if you aren't nervous you don't want it and the great players that win are never afraid to say that they want it so if you want to be a champion and you want to be great don't be afraid to say that you want it you know when glaive cries after beating astrus after so long being criticized and coming up with a team that's basically a ragtag group of guys he's comfortable to say that this [ __ ] meant a lot to him and that he did it and he won and that's what a champion is always going to be not the guy who pretends this [ __ ] is silly and I don't care and obviously for carrian the goat choker again I say that in J slightly because he's also one a ton and another reason that I wanted to make this video is because carrian is this poignant example of somebody who has achieved so much but shows us also that the job is never finished until the day that you resign right when he wins antp and he gets this hold on library at the very end of the game on Inferno versus na'vi and wins his major you think it's over he'll never choke again and then when you see Copenhagen you see the Seven Grand finals that he didn't get first place in you remember the job is never finished you continue to be human you have to try hard every single day and you have to keep overcoming and that's the scary part about carrian is also the Beautiful part for the people who have achieved so much over such a long period of time in our long history at this point I'll say it we have a long history in CS and carrian is that very human reminder that the work is done when you quit and so we'll have to see what happens next for him because he is so close to being simply the goat across all games maybe he already is honestly with his average consistency so this is a few examples over many years of Counter Strike to talk about choking and counter- strike and it's obviously a very interesting topic if you've got teams obviously there's many more stories of Chu I didn't even mention liquid I didn't even mention G2 not winning maps in Grand finals I didn't even mention Alexi B you know finally overcoming that if you've got examples of chokers that I didn't talk about or you dispute any of the chokers that I brought up I would love to talk about it because this is a discussion that goes beyond stats it's going to be it's only for the people that were there watching the games and I know that you guys have watched some of those games so let me know thanks for watching see you in the next one

Channel: launders

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Keywords: lau, coach lau, analysis, launders, launders pick ems, launders kz, launders crosshair placement, launders aim, launders bhop, launders cs2 tips, launders cs2 commentary, cs2 tips, cs2 pro tips, cs2 tutorial, cs2 news, cs2 esports news, cs2 esports, cs2 demo review, cs2, counter-strike 2, zywoo, sh1ro, cs2 major, faze cs, best of cs2, cs2 highlights, fallen cs, donk, karrigan, twistzz, faze cs2, cs2 pro settings, team liquid choke, dev1ce cs2, nip csgo, boston major csgo

Id: D8qsljHuIzQ

Length: 21min 35sec (1295 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 13 2024