Image: Ubisoft/Kirill B.
The Berlin Major will start on Monday, as 16 teams from around the world kick off their title campaign. Ahead of these games, let’s take a look at one of the most important aspects of each team’s preparation; their map pools.
Who plays which maps?
When looking across the nine maps in the pool -- Bank, Border, Chalet, Clubhouse, Kafe Dostoyevsky, Oregon, Skyscraper, Theme Park, and Villa -- clear styles and preferences can be seen across each team.
Here’s a simplified look at the maps each team played, won, and banned maps since the start of the 2022 season:
Click here to see a full-resolution image.
Here’s some of the key takeaways from the above figures:
The best record in the tournament is…
Tied between Oxygen with six out of six wins on Theme Park and Astralis with six of six on Oregon.
Starting with Oxygen, their Theme Park wins came 7-5 against Astralis and beastcoast, 8-7 against Parabellum, 7-4 and 7-2 against Dire Wolves, and 7-4 against TSM. OXG’s last professional loss there was a 6-8 against TSM at the regional NA November Major in 2020.
Astralis’ perfect Oregon record this year came with a 7-2 win against SSG, 7-4 against DZ at the Charlotte Major grand-final, 7-1 against Oxygen, 7-5 against XSET, 7-2 against Mirage, and 8-6 against DarkZero again (in Stage 1). Notably, none of these games were against non-NA teams, but DZ, XSET, and OXG have proven themselves to be world beaters as well.
Group D hates Clubhouse
One win in 10 attempts is the Group D teams’ record on Clubhouse, as it is the most banned map for three of the four teams. This includes a 2-7 loss for FURIA against Pampas, a 3-7 loss for Astralis against DarkZero in the Charlotte Major grand-final, a 4-7 loss for MNM against Heroic, and a 2-7 loss for Elevate against CAG.
FURIA’s record of one win in six games on Clubhouse is also the worst single map win record of any team in attendance.
These teams hate this map and unless one of them have been grinding it out in secret, it will probably be one of the first banned options in each head-to-head.
Elevate & Rogue are the most side-dependent teams
With a defensive win rate of 66 per cent, Elevate expect a 4-2 lead at the end of each offensive half on average. This would be even higher on defensive-sided maps, showing how powerful their defence is… at least in APAC South.
On the opposite side, Rogue habr a 63.9 per cent offensive win rate. It’s a figure that Spoit has helped pump up in Stage 2, as he topped the league on Iana, rather than most teams’ default pick of Finka.
For both these teams, their other figure is more of note. A 44.2 per cent defensive win rate for Rogue and a 49 per cent offensive win rate for Elevate is low, and now they’re set to play even harder teams.
All this means it will be particularly interesting to see who comes out on top in a head-to-head. The best statistical attack, or the best statistical defense?
Theme Park is Europe’s weak point
While this could be a case of hidden strategies and late practice on the map, Theme Park is the missing link in Europe’s map pool from what we’ve seen.
The four European representatives have only played the map three times and have yet to win on it. The NA teams, meanwhile, won it in 10 of 11 meetings, LATAM in eight of 10, and APAC in six of nine, all pretty good records.
Chalet is LATAM’s map
Latin American teams have gone to Chalet 29 times compared to Europe’s 10 plays. It’s worth noting that LATAM do play more games overall due to the Copa Elite Six tournament, but this is still a much bigger difference than any other map.
With 18 of 29 wins, this is also a 62 per cent win rate, which is the second highest for LATAM teams, only behind Kafe with 15 plays. Most of this success comes from six wins out of eight matches from NiP and seven out of 10 from w7m.