Liquid
Liquid had a very impressive showing in their opening game in ESL vs MIBR, however since then have looked way below the standard which Liquid should be at.
2 days ago they faced up against Swole Patrol, I actually did another article on this game saying how it should be a pretty easy game for Liquid, Liquid was expected to top this NA group pretty easily and come out of the group flawless however they fell short vs Swole Patrol and lost 2-0.
Yesterday they faced up against Australian side 100 Thieves. Although they did win this game 2-0 they should of arguably lost 2-0 here and looked like the much worse team. 100 Thieves had a 14-7 lead map 1 and was trading at 1.03 live and then lost the map. In map 2 100 Thieves also had a big lead of 12-5 and was once again trading very low in map 2 around 1.05 in most places however once again they threw away the map. The takeaway from this game is that once again Liquid didn't look anywhere near their best.
FURIA
This will be the opening game of ESL Pro League for Brazillian side FURIA. FURIA is one of the teams from the top tier of CSGO that actually played alot of online last year, they played in multiple qualifiers to get into big LANs and I expect them to be comfortable here playing online. I don't expect anything out of the ordinary from this team compared to some other teams.
This year there isn't too much volume on FURIA. They have only played 8 times in the opening 4 months of the year and from the games they've played it's hard to take alot from considering they haven't really played against any top level teams or in any top flight tournaments so it will be very interesting to see what they bring today against Liquid.
My Bet Reasoning
Map 1 is going to be the map pick of FURIA. I expect them to play Nuke vs Liquid. In the past 6 months Nuke has definetely been one of the weaker maps for Liquid only winning 2/9 maps played on it. This historically has also been a good map for FURIA. Although they haven't played it much recently FURIA have some pretty notable wins on this map. They took down Astralis twice in June last year which at the time was insanely impressive because Astralis was on a ridiculous Nuke run of 35-1.
Bet: FURIA Map 1 ML + FURIA Map 1 +4.5
League: ESL Pro League
Bookmaker: Unibet
Units: 1/3 + 1/3
