(Banner image: Ubisoft/Kirill Bashkirov)
As well as the title, prize money, and SI Points, the 80 players meeting in Sweden next week will also be competing for a number of accolades. “Siege” esport records concerning match numbers, titles, title belts and more all can be claimed depending on next week’s results.
Here’s a look at some of these accolades and the players who could claim them.
Series Records
So which player do you think has the most games played across all tier-one (Pro League Final, Major, and Six Invitational) LANs? Well, the greatest player of all time, Niclas “Pengu” Mouritzen, currently sits at 40 and the back-to-back SI grand-finalist Gustavo "Psycho" Rigal sits at 43. Beating both of these, however, is DarkZero’s Tyler "Ecl9pse" McMullin:
- 44 - Ecl9pse
- 43 - Troy “Canadian” Jaroslawski & Psycho
- 42 - Julio Giacomelli & João "Kamikaze" Gomes
- 40 - Gabriel "cameram4n" Hespanhol, Leonardo "Astro" Luis, and Pengu
While Ecl9pse has never won a tier-one event, he has attended every single Six Major and Six Invitational to date including a runners-up finish at SI17, and semi-final exits during SI18, SI19, and the Paris Major. That puts him right at the top of this list.
The three NiP players meanwhile played 19 out of the 42 or 43 games across their SI20 and SI21 campaigns with the improved format, really helping them rack up the maps. Psycho sits one place ahead of his two teammates due to JULIO and Kamikaze’s inability to attend the Season 10 Finals.
Seven out of the above eight names are competing in Sweden for either DZ, NiP, or FaZe. With multiple players on the same team, this means only Psycho can claim the title outright between these names. However, Astro and Cameram4n could take joint-first. Canadian is locked out of this position unless his teammate Ecl9pse is unable to play for one of their games.
Win Records
While Pengu suffered in the raw match number leaderboards, he has unsurprisingly won the highest number of series with victories in 35 out of the 40 played. The five he lost came one each in Season 6 against BD, Season 7 against Liquid, Raleigh against Empire, and two at SI20 against Fnatic and NiP.
With a possible nine games to win in Sweden, Canadian could tie Pengu’s record as he sits on 26 series wins at the moment across 43 games. This does, however, require him to not just win the Major, but do so without losing in the group stage. No other player can catch up to Pengu at this event, however, with Psycho on 24, JULIO and Kamikaze on 23, and Ecl9pse on 21, this should become an attainable goal for all these players come SI22.
Should Canadian win the Six Sweden Major with a flawless group stage, this would add 13 map wins to his total. At the moment he sits with a 58-46 tier-one record which is the second-highest in the world behind Pengu on 76-20, well out of his reach.
If we expand the definition to include “R6” Minors, however, Pengu’s record is 97-33 and Canadian is at 84-63, just 13 maps behind him. While he’s still well behind on actual silverware, a win in Sweden will both close the gap in this regard and put the two Siege legends neck-and-neck on two separate win records.
Title Records
Out of the 80 players playing next week, a massive 25% of them all have won a tier-one title before. Half of these 20 are the full lineups of NiP and oNe, four come from Raleigh’s winners, Team Empire, another four come from the SI20-winning SSG roster, there’s Ellis “GiG” Hindle who coached Natus Vincere to victory during Season 10 Finals and Renshiro who won the Pro League way back in Season 2.
These 20 make up 22% of all tier-one title-winning players while the four Empire players and Canadian make up 29% of all multi-time winners.
This shows how ridiculously rare achieving that feat is as even at the highest tier of play only five out of 80 players have lifted multiple global trophies, a group the other 15 players will be eager to join.
Looking a bit wider out, a win by DZ here would put Canadian in the top five by pure trophy lifts alongside the five Paris Major winning players while a win by Empire would arguably make them the second-greatest team in Siege history, depending on how highly you value SI titles over Six Major wins.
- 7 - Pengu
- 6 - Goga, Fabian, Joonas
- 4 - Kantoraketti
- 3 - Canadian
- 2 - ShepparD, JoyStiCk, Scyther, Dan, karzheka, Necrox, nvK, Yung, Falko, KS, SHA77E
- 1 - 37 other players
Siege Title Belt
Using a knock-out title system similar to that used in boxing and professional wrestling, we here at SiegeGG have been tracking the path of the theoretical Siege Title Belt holders throughout the history of competitive “Rainbow Six: Siege”.
Starting with gBots victory over GiFu in the very first Pro League game, they kept the belt until their next loss when it transferred over to the team which beat them. This has continued for six years, now passing between all four regions and arriving at the Six Sweden Major.
While the belt spent almost all of Years 1, 2, and 4 in Europe, Spacestation Gaming’s SI20 victory took the title to North America where it has remained ever since. The COVID-19 pandemic meant there were no international tournaments where NA could lose the title for 15 months, while Mirage’s final day victory over the Soniqs and OxG’s last-second victory over TSM during Stages 1 and 2 meant the title didn’t travel to either the SI21 or Mexico Major competitions.
Now, 21 months later, Spacestation Gaming will enter the Six Sweden Major with the title belt where in all likelihood, foreign hands will finally get hold of it once again. FURIA and Empire getting the first shot at it on Monday, Nov. 8.
You can view its full six-year path across 232 games here.
Regional Rivalries
Across the three prior Six Major events, Europe has been pretty undeniably the best region. As well as two titles, European teams made up eight of the 12 semi-finalists, with Europe’s worst performance at the Mexico Major being about equal to NA’s best performance at the Paris Major.
The same cannot be said about Six Invitational results, as while Europe has won two titles North America has on paper been the more consistent region when looking at the number of top-four finishes.
If you combine the results across these major events, this is how the global trophy cabinets look like at the moment:
- EU - 4 first places, 3 second place, and 6 third/fourth-place finishes
- NA - 2 first places, 3 second-places, and 5 third/fourth-place finishes
- LATAM - 2 first place, 2 second-places, and 4 third/fourth-place finishes
- APAC - 1 third/fourth-place finish
Obviously, when the Pro League tournaments are added to this count, Europe runs away with it as they won eight of the 10 Finals.
Nevertheless, this year alone LATAM has caught up to NA’s total title count and is just behind them on second and third-place finishes. This, therefore, means that LATAM’s current dominant streak is close to making them the second-best region across Siege’s history, which would be a massive achievement for the region considering North America’s presence in the esport.
Even if you also consider the seven Pro League seasons in which both NA and LATAM were a part of, LATAM has both won an actual title during Season 7 and attended more grand-finals than North America -- four to three. North America's lone Pro League title during Season 3 was three months before LATAM’s debut on the international scene, making it somewhat unfair to hold it against them.
Should LATAM’s domination continue it’s possible that the region ends Year 6 with more Major trophies in their cabinet than even Europe, an unthinkable scenario at the beginning of the year.
