The Recap - 2025 EP03

Written by Joshua "OnlyJoshin" Warmington

Welcome to The Recap, the content series covering Counter-Strike in the ANZ region with a touch of global action here and there. The Recap covers our region, from ESEA Open, ECL, and global events, to local LAN and online tournaments hosted here at home.

IEM Melbourne 2025 is official!

It is official! The mysterious IEM Spring 2025 will be held in Melbourne. An IEM phoenix rises from the ashes of the cancelled DreamHack 2025.

The tournament will start from April 21 to 27 with the playoffs being in the Rod Laver Arena from the 25th.IEM Melbourne 2025 is a purely invite-based tournament with 16 teams. Ten teams will be invited from the Valve Global Standings, while two teams will be invited from each subregion (America, Europe and Asia).

The initial invited teams can decline their invite, and their invite will be passed down to the next team. Based on today’s global rankings, the following teams would be invited:

• Global Ranking Invites
  • FaZe
  • Vitality
  • MOUZ
  • NaVi
  • Falcons
  • paiN
  • MIBR
  • GamerLegion
  • 3DMAX
  • Eternal Fire
• American Invites
  • Liquid
  • FURIA
• European Invites
  • G2
  • Spirit
• Asian Invites
  • The MongolZ
  • FlyQuest

There have been some rumours that some teams may decline their invites based on the closer YaLLa tournament with a higher amount of prize money (and most importantly, VRS points).

DFrag will be at the event like last year with Dreamhack Melbourne to cover all the action both on the stage and behind the scenes. If you see us around, say hi!

DFrag Invitational – The First Oceanic VRS Event

Some of you may have noticed that Valve had published some exceptions to their rules which contained a certain DFrag tournament. Well, now it is official!

DFrag will host Oceania’s first VRS event with a prize pool of $20,000 and a fully-fleshed open and closed qualifiers with the offline finals being hosted in Brisbane.

The top four VRS teams in OCE will be invited directly to the event while the next four OCE VRS rated teams will be invited directly to the closed qualifier instead. If any team declines an invite, the invite will be passed to the next highest team.

The Open Qualifiers start on February 1 (this weekend!), so make sure you sign up before it is too late!

ESL Challenger League Season 49 – The Rooster stampede commences

Rooster has started the ECL 2025 season flawlessly  with victories over fellow rivals Mindfreak and the team that denied playoffs for Rooster in Season 48, Mantra Flow. Rooster looked relentless and even took down Mindfreak on their favoured pick of Nuke.

Rooster was firing on all cylinders with the entire team putting up huge numbers across the board. Asap delivered a 108 ADR on Nuke against Mindfreak which is probably the most impressive stat line of the lot.

The most impressive clip was the asap triple kill on Dust 2 against Mantra with an insanely perfect flash from TjP. It even caught me off guard thinking it was a mistake!

In other matches, KZG with the new additions of foggers and Kras got off to a perfect start with a Mantra stomping but were humbled massively by MindFreak. JFT and Underground split the points with JFT taking the Head to Head Tiebreaker based on Margin of Victory. 

Vantage secured a 2-0 against Underground which was effectively a rematch of their recent ESEA Open Grand Final.

Despite being stomped in their first two series, Mantra hit back by taking down The Art of War. It was a much needed series win for Mantra, who were looking down the barrel of three straight series defeats.

Housebets started their season with a clean sweep of Underground and looked quite clean with pz coming into the lineup.

January 22
JFT v Underground (13-10, 11-13)
Rooster v Mindfreak (13-9, 13-7)
KZG v Mantra (13-3, 13-5)

January 23
Vantage v Underground (13-9, 13-11)
Rooster v Mantra (13-5, 16-13)

January 28
Mantra v The Art of War (13-7, 13-5)
Mindfreak v KZG (13-5, 13-1)
Housebets v Underground (13-9, 13-5)

That is all from us and well, what a flurry of announcements! See you all later!