Why is the Asian Region in Counter-Strike Lagging Behind the Rest?
The Asian region in professional Counter-Strike (CS) has been lagging behind all the other regions in producing quality high tier teams. Besides TheMongolZ, the only other notable Asian team that turned heads was TYLOO back in 2016 at DreamHack Masters Malmo when they defeated Luminosity who at the time was the best team in the world just coming off winning MLG Columbus 2016.
So, what is holding back a region that dominates in multiple other esports like League of Legends, DOTA 2, StarCraft II, Overwatch 2 and many more from dominating in the professional CS scene as well? Many of the games mentioned above are dominated by Korean teams and there are currently zero Korean teams in the CS scene. The region is also drawn more to Multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) games even in the first-person shooter (FPS) genre with many Asian FPS pros opting for Overwatch or Valorant to go professionally in.
This caused a small number of teams in Asia to create their own playstyle in the early years and instead of learning default executions and proper post plants and retakes they opted to lean into their high mechanical skill and rely heavily on taking risky duels in a hope to simply out aim their opponent.
The only way these teams can scrim against European teams is to connect to matches playing usually at 200-300 plus ping just to get the chance to play against some of the top teams, or to travel to Europe to boot camp with them.
This lack of experience is evident if you watch a European team’s demo versus an Asian team’s demo and look how each team plays a post plant differently. Simple things like proper rotations and keeping a cool level head are missing in these situations. In a post plant situation or retake situation if one of their teammates die some teams will almost panic and over peek aggressively giving their opponents multiple one-on-one duels rather than dual swinging them to get a proper trade.
The outlier to this region is TheMongolZ, who at the most recent major made it to the Elimination Stage giving their region one more spot to qualify for the Shanghai Major meaning this will be the first time that three Asian teams will qualify for a major. TheMongolZ have boot camped extensively in Europe against some of the top tier teams in the world, and even with all that boot camping they still struggle in prolonged series like best of threes and show old habits often in some situations.
The Asian scene may be lagging behind now, but with more teams making majors from the region it will lead to a rise of teams in the region and more players coming to the professional scene. We saw this with a higher influx of North American teams after Cloud9 won ELEAGUE Major 2018.
