Another night, another great slate of esports action to look forward to. This Tuesday night, our gaming expert takes a look at some of the key matchups across the IEM New York 2020 CIS and the DreamHack Open Fall 2020!
ESports Betting Tips: Tuesday, October 20th
Natus Vincere vs forZe
IEM New York 2020 CIS
This match was supposed to be played a few days ago but got postponed after Ilya "Perfecto" Zalutskiy got infected with COVID-19. The decision to move the match did not go down well with forZe players, who were all over social media complaining that Natus Vincere should have played with a stand-in instead.
The last time NaVi met with forZe was in March during the ESL Pro League Season 11 Europe, where NaVi secured a 2-1 win with 12-16 on Inferno, 19-17 on Train and 16-13 on Nuke. Dmitriy "facecrack" Alekseyev was the best player on the server with 75 frags and 1.21 HLTV rating, while Denis "electronic" Sharipov and Aleksandr "s1mple" Kostyliev shone the brightest on the side of NaVi with 1.16 and 1.09 HLTV rating respectively.
Despite their loss, forZe came close to winning the series, which makes me believe they won't just roll over and die here. I expect another close match and since forZe are in good form (72% win rate across the past three months, six-game winning streak) on top of the fact that NaVi dropped a map against Cyber Legacy, there is no reason to believe forZe can't make NaVi work for the W. Bet on Over 2.50 Maps!
Sprout vs GODSENT
DreamHack Open Fall 2020
Sprout are entering this bout with a fairly impressive 73% win rate across the past three months. In their last five, Sprout lost only two games against Ninjas in Pyjamas and North, which I don't feel like they should be criticised for too much since both are objectively much stronger sides.
GODSENT, on the other side, won only two matches in their last five against FaZe and sAw. Unfortunately, they lost the second match against sAw and against two significantly stronger teams in BIG and Astralis.
Even though GODSENT's record across last five games looks worse, I am shocked by the betting odds. While Sprout's 73% win rate looks amazing on paper, they mostly played weaker teams such as Nordavind, Singularity, Secret and AA, so their record should be taken with a grain of salt.
The problem I have with Sprout is that they rely too much on Denis "denis" Howell and Timo "Spiidi" Richter. If those two perform up to par, Sprout might have a chance to win, but if either of the two underperforms, I'm not sure if Josef "faveN" Baumann and Paweł "dycha" Dycha can do enough damage to secure their team a W.
Player-to-player, GODSENT look better and are generally far more consistent with their showings. I would not be surprised if GODSENT win 2-0, but for this prediction, we will take the safer route. Bet on GODSENT to win!
Gambit vs HellRaisers
IEM New York 2020 CIS
Gambit have played only 11 games since rebranding from Gambit Youngsters and so far they did not fail to impress. Much of their success comes down to Gambit’s decision to add a former Major champion Abay "Hobbit" Khasenov to the squad, who is helping with the development of younger talent.
Across the last five games, Gambit lost against Spirit and forZe, which does not concern me since these CIS matches are often a complete coin-flip. Besides their two losses, Gambit defeated Winstrike and Ethereal with relative ease.
HellRaisers are 1-4 in their last five with a win over Winstrike and losses against Espada, Spirit, Nemiga and Illuminar. Although HellRaisers managed to win 62% of their matches across the last three months, most of their wins came against lower-ranked squads such as Singularity, Secret, PACT and FATE.
HellRaisers are simply not a good team and are arguably the same level of quality as Winstrike and Ethereal. Even though they look somewhat solid when facing weaker sides, HellRaisers don't have enough firepower to match Sergey "Ax1Le" Rykhtorov and Dmitry "sh1ro" Sokolov. Bet on Gambit to crush HellRaisers!
