Strife kick player mid-series in ESL Challenger League

The ESL Challenger League Season 40 is well under-way, with regions winding towards the play-off bracket right now.

Strife has had a middling season so far, but a wipeout in an early round pushed the team into unique circumstances recently. Strife kick a player mid-series after a map probably wasn’t what fans expected though. It left the team having to pull in a stand-in and find a new member of this squad for their next game. This is what happened and what’s going to happen to Strife following this:

Danny “cxzi” Strzelczyk

Strife Kick Player Mid-Series

The ESL Challenger League is a lower-tier event in CSGO, but a decent test for teams on this level. It is one of the bigger regional Leagues, with the winner of the ESL Challenger League taking a seed for the EPL Conference along with a decent prize pool. Some regions are already moving into their play-off bracket. However, the North America region is going to be running through to April 3^rd.

Strife are competing in the ESL Challenger League. This week they came up against MIBR in their most recent match. This got off to a bad start, with a 16-5 loss on Overpass. The first map went pretty badly, with their one player having a particularly bad result. Cxzi put in a bad performance, with a terrible K/D ratio. Across most metrics, this was close to the worse performance of his career.

He was pretty quickly replaced with AAustiN, However, the team went on to lose their next map Dust II 16-6. Replacing a player mid-way through a series is definitely a weird move and it showed that Strife was seriously panicking about the match, they ended up losing the series anyway.

Strife are currently sat pretty low down in standings for Season 40. This calls for drastic measures, although Strife kicking a player mid-series was still a shock. Cxczi is going to be gone from the entire line-up of the time and a loose end.  The player isn’t going to be returning to Strife at all. If this performance is going to be the end of his career on this tier we don’t know at the moment, but it’s possible he might have to prove his worth again after this dramatic turn.

Strife’s Future

The team won’t be bringing AAustiN into the team full time.  Instead, D4rtyMontana is said to be joining as a new fifth member of the team. He’ll be jumping onto the team full-time, having previously been a part of the squad as a stand-in at the Mythic Winter Cup earlier this year.

Strife hasn’t had the strongest run at Season 40. However, just a little while ago they won a LAN even, Fragadelphia. This saw them come out ahead on a pretty wide mix of teams. Cxzi even played an important role in this win, despite his drop in fortunes since. This was one of the more unexpected ways that these matches could have gone over the last few weeks. However, there is still a bit of time left in the tournament, we’ll have to see how Strife develops over the rest of the season.

Cxzi’s future is now put into question as well. Being replaced mid-way through a series can be detrimental to a player’s career. We have to wait and see what the future holds for this young talent.