Gonzo Awards: Worst LAN Performance of The Year

Everything is on LAN these days so the specificity might seem moot but it's always worth recognising spectacular failures

Previous Winners

🥇 2010: FM Toxic At Slap #2

🥇 2011: mTw At ESWC

🥇 2012: Michael "mK" Zaidi (Team VeryGames) – Copenhagen Games

🥇 2013: Curse / IBUYPOWER at DreamHack

🥇 2014: CLG, post Korean boot-camp, NA LCS Summer Play-offs Quarter Final

🥇 2015: No Award

🥇 2016: No Award

And the winner is… Evil Geniuses CS at every tournament.

Resurrecting this award feels weird because in truth it is a relic of a bygone era. For context when the majority of esports were played online with just a few LAN events dotted on the calendar a discrepancy between performances in the two environments was always worthy of comment. The implications were that those guilty of failure in a LAN environment were bottlers at best and cheaters at worst. These days you don’t hear the word “onliner” much because all events worthy of discussion have LAN environments as a staple something that wasn’t the case back in 2010.

Regardless the award can essentially be re-purposed as one recognising failure and this year’s winners served up plenty of that. The Evil Geniuses Counter-Strike team went from being a number one team in the world in 2019 to one that was threatened with removal from ESL events for being unable to place anywhere other than dead last. The roster was so serially mismanaged that there was no discernable difference in performance between the one that had iconic names and the one that had ESEA heroes. A look at there Liquipedia page will show you more blues than a viagra executive at a Joe Bonamassa gig. In terms of failure they are unquestionably the worst team to ever be propped up in the tier one scene via the mechanism of partnered leagues. How embarrassing it must be to know that your other colleagues seriously held discussions about having you removed from a league you bought your way in to because you offered no value despite being one of the only North American teams left.

Let us also take a moment to recognise the abject failure of “The Blueprint” concept they pushed. In addition to their failing main team they went and picked up another two rosters that had consistently proven they weren’t good enough for the highest tier of competitive play. The theory was that in house training would help develop the weaker players and that somewhere in the combination of a fifteen man roster there was a five stack that could actually get the org back to winning ways. This of course flies contrary to the twenty years of things we know about building successful esports teams, that consistency of line-up helps players find an in-game short hand that translates to improved play on the server… But hey the Peak6 era Evil Geniuses management teams actually take all that “disruptor” bullshit seriously so they did almost everything they could differently for the sake of it.

An anecdote I was told during my many hours interviewing dozens of current and former EG employees and players was that the whole “Blueprint” thing was actually conceived at short notice as a way to retain their ESL spot. The tournament operator were carrying some legacy guilt about effectively contributing to the demise of North America as a region when they stole Pro League spots from qualified teams so they could sell them to more lucrative partners. While EG did believe the project could work they also knew that if they could sell it as helping develop NA as a whole ESL would let them linger and continue to serve up the hot garbage that was watching EG play. For context they didn’t have a single placement at a meaningful tournament in the whole of 2023 and couldn’t even win the most recent regional qualifiers for DreamHack Winter or Atlanta. They have gone from being one of the greatest brands in all of Counter-Strike to being utterly eclipsed by start-up orgs like Nouns and M80.

Still they did give us one of the greatest memes of all time… After a fluke win against the notoriously inconsistent Heroic we were told great things about the talent pipeline and to step out the echochamber. Now that pipeline looks like Nord Stream and the only thing echoing is the empty trophy room as the Evil Geniuses org shuts down.