The Jönköping Major will start tomorrow, on Monday, as 16 teams from around the world will 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 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…
Heroic and FaZe Clan both have six wins in six games on Kafe.
For Heroic, they won on Kafe against NAVI (8-6 and 7-3), BDS (7-5), LFO (7-4), Outsiders (7-5), and Secret (7-2). Notably, they lost to Rogue in the Gamers Without Borders qualifiers and against TENSTAR in the Northern Premier League finals.
FaZe, meanwhile, beat TropiCaos (8-7), Team oNe (7-3), w7m (8-6 and 7-5), FURIA (7-4), and NiP (7-3) on Kafe. They also beat MIBR, DarkZero, Elevate, CAG, and SSG on Kafe at SI 2022 and won Kafe as the final map during the Sweden Major grand-final.
CYCLOPS also had nine wins in 10 maps on Clubhouse, while w7m had 12 wins in 14 attempts on the same map.
W7m are looking like the best
W7m esports have the best attacking and defensive win rate of all teams.
They also have an excellent record on four separate maps -- more than any other team -- as they won eight out of 10 times on Border, 12 out of 14 times on Clubhouse, eight out of 11 times on Kafe, and seven out of nine on Villa.
With teams only getting three map bans per best-of-three game, this means that w7m will always get to go to one of these four options.
Group D is very defence-favoured
On average, compared to the three other groups, Group D’s teams have the best defensive record and the worst attacking record with nine percent being between the two figures.
This is due to Wolves Esports and FaZe both having two of the five highest defensive win rates, while Mirage have the lowest offensive win rate by far.
No one in Group C has gone to Theme Park
A game of chicken may develop in who bans Theme Park in Group C, as all four teams -- w7m esports, Team BDS, Spacestation Gaming, and FURY -- have avoided the map during the 2022 season.
Notably, SSG have had a month with no games, so they have likely practised this map to pull out in a clutch situation.
W7m on attack versus FURY should be a massacre
The best attack win rate in the field comes from w7m, while the lowest defensive win rate comes from FURY. These two teams are in the same group so will meet twice.
CYCLOPS the attack leaders?
In Group A, CYCLOPS athlete gaming have the best offensive win rate at 50.00 percent. This is better than all four of their opponents -- Soniqs, MNM Gaming, and Black Dragons..
The vast majority of CAG’s games have been in the APAC region and in the Japanese national league, which would somewhat inflate their numbers upwards.
NA statistically struggling
Due in part to the region struggling in Berlin and due to the NAL being very competitive, the NA teams have the lowest average attack and defence-sided win rates. Mirage’s figures, however, drag down the average significantly.