The last tier one event of the 2021 CS:GO calendar will be the BLAST Premier World Final. The current HLTV #1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 ranked teams are attending alongside two legendary organisations, Astralis (9) and Team Liquid (12). BLAST has understood from their inception that money talks and it is very loud in CS:GO. They consistently bring in the top organisations, and those teams consistently bring their game.

At the 2020 Global Finals, Astralis, Vitality, and Navi - who were the top three in the world entering the event - finished in the top three at the event, with Navi taking the number one spot. In 2019, Astralis - still in the midst of their dominant era - also secured that title without dropping a map and earned two 2-0 series over the second-best team that year, Team Liquid. While past trends are by no means a given for future determinations, they should not be disregarded entirely either.

Given the short field of only eight teams, an argument can be made for any of these top teams placing highly at the tournament. However, every analyst and CS:GO fan would agree that the trophy is undoubtedly NAVI’s to lose. Having dropped just two best-of-three series while putting up a 31-2 win-loss match record since the start of ESL One Cologne back in July, this team has not slowed down in the least since their Major victory in Stockholm.

BLAST Premier: World Final 2021 - To Win Outright

Pinnacle is offering odds of 1.750* for the world number one team in the To Win Outright (All in) market. Another way to frame this would be ‘do NAVI close out their year with another trophy for which they have a 60% success rate’. Both Team Vitality and Gambit have been formidable challengers for quite some time now. While the French side holds the top player in the world over the last two years, “ZywOo”, it is Gambit who have actually consistently taken down the team led by “S1mple”. It is this ability to play against NAVI which makes their implied probability of 20% good for second on the Outright market.

G2 Esports and Heroic have also had a few shots at the current champions but they too have come up short. Heroic recently got the better of the CIS squad on a singular map only to fall once more on the decider, Overpass, despite winning both pistols and conversions. As for G2, let us just hope that “Niko”’s Deagle is not firing blanks. On a serious note, their series against Navi at the PGL Major Stockholm final was reminiscent of so many series against NAVI we have seen in the second half of this year.

There are a handful of other teams playing excellent Counter-Strike; however, they do not seem to have the supreme well-rounded elements that NAVI have been displaying at the moment. That being said, this is a little more than just a ‘hot stretch’. To find a team at this event, not named Gambit, that have beaten “S1mple” and co. this year you would need to go back to February when Team Liquid beat them in two best-of-three series.

Including those two losses, one of which still featured “Flamie” (now cut from the team), NAVI has a map record of 38-14 against the non-CIS competitors at BLAST Premier World Final. It should be noted that many of these rosters have also gone through changes so the results are correctly comparable with the same five-man team.

Outright odds of 1.700* can be difficult to get excited about, even in backing a team of Navi’s firepower and form. Thankfully there are a few other markets on display already!

BLAST Premier: World Final 2021 - Prop bets

If you viewed our PGL Major Stockholm prop bets preview, you may recall an introduction to lines on ‘To Score an Ace’. We commented that we would expect eight or more aces to come from the Legend’s stage into the playoffs and that what is required is opportunity more than anything. Aces are more likely to occur for a team with weapon superiority, meaning the better a team is performing, the more opportunities they will have to be against worse weaponry and therefore multi-kill rounds are also more likely.

The best way to start would be a firm analysis of ace percentages by map, side, and economy - including pistols. However, for the sake of getting the idea across, there were 15 aces marked at the Major. Nine of those were scored by a player from a team that won the map, while 11 of those were achieved by a player whose team won that particular half. A further breakdown indicates that the majority of those occurred with a superior purchase coming from the team whose player scored the ace, but we will leave a deep dive on that topic until another day.

At the Major, “S1mple” was the only player priced as more likely to get an ace than to not do so. Those that did back him may have been sweating until the final half of the last map of the entire event! Many other stars also hit the ace award, including “ZywOo, “Niko”, “Rez” and “Elige”, all of whom are in attendance once more. Just about every roster’s best player is offered up on this line for varying payouts, from odds of 2.000* on “S1mple” to 3.900* on “Naf”.

Finally, it should be noted that the format for the BLAST Premier World Final will be a double-elimination bracket. All teams begin with the same distance to go in the upper bracket. A loss in both the upper and lower bracket will mean elimination while winning three matches out of the gate will make one team a finalist facing a challenger from the lower bracket.

Thanks for a fantastic year of dialogue, questions, and suggestions on our CS:GO articles. We have some great things planned for 2022 and look forward to chatting more esports betting!