Last year’s runners up take victory in Red Bull Flick CS:GO final

The Australian Red Bull Flick CS:GO tournament has ended up with last year’s runners up claiming the crown. Dead Weight, the 2020 second placed team, defeated Steam Support in the two-on-two competition. This is the second time the Red Bull Flick competition has been run in Australia. Red Bull Flick gives amateur players the chance to compete against some of the best pro players in the world.

Its two-on-two competition features a custom map: Hold the Flag. Players are sent into a sci-fi-like setting and must gain control of the area. This year, more than 550 players registered for the competition, with eight teams battling it out in the national final for nearly 8,000 viewers. After gaining some experience from last year’s competition, Dead Weight came out on top. We had a chat with the team to understand how they were able to gain the win.

Dead Weight learn from experience

Last year, Dead Weight almost beat Dynamic Du-Woah in the Red Bull Flick final. The match went down to the wire, where Dead Weight lost in the final few seconds. So Dead Weight, made up of Mr Sharky and Velocity (Velo), came back this year with the goal to win. Velocity told us it was about taking the experience from last year and learning from that. Velocity told Upcomer “we had some experience from the previous Redbull Flick which was a different game mode but gave us foresight in how we should prepare for this variation of Redbull Flick.”

The pair started training as soon as the custom maps were released for this year. Velocity said this was key to their practice: “We got into the maps as soon as they were released and found a few friends who were happy to play with us for fun and so that we could get some experience on the maps. We did spend some time theory crafting the best strategies and ended up versing multiple different players prior to the tournament to see how their different play styles affected our gameplay.”

This strategy, crafting and practicing certain plays, worked in favor of Dead Weight. They went into the tournament confident that they could win. They didn’t drop a single game all tournament and became the favorites to take the victory. The grand final however, was a different story.

Red Bull Flick final sees Dead Weight drop into the lower bracket

Dead Weight hadn’t lost a single round in the lead up to the Red Bull Flick final. The upper bracket final however, saw them pitted against Steam Support on the only map they hadn’t practiced. They thought it was a very straight forward map and hadn’t put in the time to experience it before the finals. Dead Weight subsequently lost to Steam Support, and dropped into the lower bracket. The duo saw this upper bracket performance as one of their worst so far. They knew they had to do better to come back from the lower bracket and make it to the grand final.

Whilst they hadn’t practiced this map, they knew that the upcoming maps would fall in their favor. Velocity told us that while practicing, Dead Weight found a style and stuck at it: “We found a style that worked extremely well with our playstyle and a few weeks prior to the starting of the tournament we were feeling extremely confident that we would be able to make it into the grand finals and most likely win the entire competition, having this confidence also kept us calm as we knew regardless of what went wrong, we had fundamentals to fall back on.”

Luckily, this mindset helped put Dead Weight into the final on a map they were comfortable with. They were confident they could put in the performance needed to win the final match. As they came up against Steam Support, the maps did indeed fall in their favor. Dead Weight went on to claim victory.

You can re-watch all the Red Bull Flick action on the official Red Bull Twitch channel.