The champions of the Summer Circuit

This is The Final Circle, a newsletter for competitive Apex

Yesterday marked the one-year anniversary of the $500,000 Poland Preseason Invitational, where after 11 final matches TSM notched the biggest win in Apex history. Coincidentally, yesterday was also TSM Albralelie’s birthday.

This year’s big tournament closed out the Summer Circuit and crowned winners across four ‘Super Regions’, awarding a less substantial but still hefty $388,000 in prize money.

LYNX TH, a Thai team, won Asia Pacific South and $15,000, dunking on the other top squads with 89 points—33 points ahead of second place team DreamFire—and a dominant 20 kill win to end the tournament.

Asia Pacific North was a much closer contest. By the seventh match, five teams were eligible to win, but it was the Japanese team Blackbird Ventus that clutched up for their $15,000 check. They won the tourney with 79 points, one behind OP.GG SPORTS and three behind the powerhouse T1 Korea.

Europe, Middle East and Africa was a five-match sprint to the finish. The North squad started out strong, but it was the unsigned team of GnaskeStrafeDel that won $36,000 in the first round they were match-point eligible, outpositioning North in a bizarre, mostly unplayable final circle. (Max-Strafe was signed to Natus Vincere just before the tourney start.)

CLG, the North American squad of the moment, came out on top in the Americas. Complexity was perhaps the more dominant team, ending the day with 94 points, 12 points ahead of the pack, but CLG, with 82 points and second in the field, got the all-important W when it counted most, dashing the dreams of the highly aggressive, fan-favorite Complexity roster.

The complete results are here on Liquipedia. So, what are the takeaways from this tournament? It’s mostly things fans and pros have been discussing for a while now. One was the fairness of the match point format: two of the four tournaments ended with the teams who scored the most points not winning, a little weird to process, particularly since the rest of the Summer Circuit used a different format.

The other big story, one we didn’t hear about on the official @PlayApex broadcast but was mentioned on every pro stream I watched, was lag and server issues. We all know that online play can never really be fair, given the far-flung geography of these teams and the impossibility of no-lag play outside LAN tourneys, but we saw noticeable lag and even some crashes in the Playoffs.

Gnaske, who was seriously thinking he might quit pro Apex a couple of weeks ago, ended up with a nice check that might change his mind. We’ve yet to see whether he or his teammate SirDel will get an offer from an org, though.

Lastly, the ‘improved zone logic’ made an unsurprising appearance in the last game of the EMEA tournament.

North’s rpr (who lost on that zone) admitted they misplayed it; while Gnaske makes the good point that shitty zones aren’t somehow impossible to play.

Ok, everyone! I’m taking a solid two weeks off and will be back in touch in early October for a big Autumn Circuit preview—hopefully the last online tournament set before we go back to LAN.

Thanks as always for reading.

UR Scrubb

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