Rare Atom are Eliminated From Perfect World Shanghai Major

The team that single-handedly ruined everyone’s Perfect World Shanghai Major pick ’ems has been eliminated in round 4 of the opening stage. To call Rare Atom an underdog in the tournament would be the understatement of the century. But after an extremely rough start, the Chinese squad found their feet during round 3 of the first stage of the tournament and started to make me believe that they could get to elims.

Home town advantage for Rare Atom

The crowd was behind Rare Atom every step of the way and that buff really paid off. Almost everyone, myself included, had written them off from day 1 but perhaps this is one of those teams that performs the best when the stakes are the highest. Watching them go up against the MongolZ power house in round 1 was painful. Virtus.Pro wasn’t much better. But the game that eliminated Fnatic was where they really came alive and showed why they deserved to play on the stage at the Shanghai Major.

Comeback is real! 🇨🇳RA turned it around from a 4-8 disadvantage on T-side Anubis, closing map 2 at 13-11 with a solid CT-side! Summer’s insane transfer sparked the comeback and we are going to map 3, Ancient. #ShanghaiMajor2024 pic.twitter.com/rCKmAKcYkj

— CS_PerfectWorld (@CS_PerfectWorld) December 2, 2024

Today, in an elimination game, Rare Atom faced off with MIBR in one of the most exciting games I’ve seen in a long time. MIBR won game one on Inferno in fairly convincing fashion, taking it 13-9 but game two on Anubis really was something else. Rare Atom forcing their way through mollies, refusing to save even when it would mean losing an AWP and just running it down caught MIBR off guard again and again. When their backs were against the wall, Rare Atom showed us what they’re made of and for their first ever S-tier event, a Major no less, this was an amazing performance. Rare Atom finally managed to break their Anubis curse and took map 2.

I think it’s worth mentioning that MIBR definitely made some mistakes on Anubis. Awkward smokes and overly committed bomb carriers did nothing to help the situation. Lucaozy was caught out of position more than once, especially in round 22, which equalized the score at 11-11. And this is when the likes of ChildKing and L1haNg came into their own.

It all comes down to this

I’m sorry to say but alas, it wasn’t meant to be. Ancient was a thorn in Rare Atom’s side from round 1 and they couldn’t find any of the synergy or fight that we’d seen from them in the first two maps. It was a truly dominant game from MIBR, the mistakes from map 2 were nowhere in sight and it was the end of the road for the hometown heroes.

Competitive CS is all about the comebacks and making progress. This Chinese team got a grand total of 6 rounds in their first 2 games and I for one thought they’d be first to go out. It simply took some time for them to warm up but they showed us what they’re made of and it was great to see them put up a fight. It’ll be worth keeping an eye on what they can do going into the 2025 season.