Sprout vs K23: An unpredictable match?

Pinnacle Winter Series 1 is a European online tournament featuring 20 teams for a prize pool of $68,000. The tournament winner will receive $40,000 in prize money and a slot to LAN Sweet LAN 2022, to be held in Serbia with a prize pool of $250,000. Only one team, K23, remains in the playoff stage from the CIS region. Will the xsepower team reach the final and win the tournament, or will the European teams dominate this tournament? The answer to this question is that we will know very soon, but we can enjoy a cool and spectacular CS in the meantime.

On January 31, Sprout and K23 will play in Pinnacle Winter Series 1. Which team will be stronger, who will pass on, and who will leave the tournament?

Sprout has long been among the top 30 teams and is currently in the 23rd position. The team doesn't stand still and constantly participates in shooting 2,3 tournaments to show good results. But here's tier-1 scene has not yet been given to the European team, and shortly we're unlikely to see Sprout at this level. As for Pinnacle Winter Series 1, Sprout won 3 out of 4 matches, and only one time, the team Spiidi lost 2-1 against Tricked. Not to say that all winning matches were as easy as Sprout wanted, but they managed to get through to the final part of the tournament with a bitter heartbreak.

The European team is in the playoff stage, where they will play in the first match against the CIS team - K23. Unlike most teams, Sprout has statistics on every map, and the best map is dust2 with 85%, and the worst is nuke 38%. In a match against K23, the European team will pick either ancient with an 82% win rate or inferno with a 76% win rate. This is because K23 has a less than 50% win rate on these two maps. Sprout has very good stats on the maps, and if you don't count nuke, the European team has more than a 60% win rate on all maps.

K23 is the last surviving CIS team to make it to the playoffs. Most recently, K23 finished second at Malta Vibes Knockout Series 5, where the CIS team lost 2-0 to France's HEET in the final. All in all, not a bad result for a team currently ranked 19th by HLTV.org. The top 20 finish is largely thanks to a win over Astralis at the Funspark. It was a sensational victory that stirred up the entire community. But later, K23 couldn't use this victory for further growth, and in the end, they left the tournament after losing to BIG and ECSTATIC. Despite such a defeat, K23 continued their appearance in Tournament 2 and Pinnacle Winter Series 1. The CIS team safely got to the playoff stage, beating MOUZ NXT, SKADE and GamerLegion in 3 out of 4 matches. xsepower lost 0-2 only in the match against Endpoint.

In the match against Sprout, K23 is the favorite, and the main reason for this is the team's recent results, which are an order of magnitude better than those of the European team. If we compare the mappool of the two teams, Sprout has a slightly better, but not the fact that this will help them beat the CIS team. K23 by tradition will pick mirage, which they have 86%, and the decisive map of this confrontation will be either overpass or dust2 as these teams have the same percentage of win rate on these maps.

Both teams have gained serious momentum, and each is worthy of reaching the grand final. But only one of these teams will reach the final, and in my opinion, this tense match will have more than 2.5 maps, and the odds on that are 1.90. Also, for fans of exact scores and huge odds, you can take on a 2-1 win for K23, with odds of 3.25. In addition, you can take Total Under 26.5 rounds on the first map for 1.87.