Summer is traditionally one of the biggest windows for organizations to seriously rethink their rosters. This year, the first season of 2026 wrapped up with a Major — and for the first time, that Major was IEM Cologne, an event that used to do the exact opposite and kick off the season right after teams came back from their break. Now most orgs have nearly a full month before BLAST

When Cache landed in CS2, you'd have been hard-pressed to find a single person in the community who doubted it would slot straight into the Active Duty pool right after the IEM Cologne Major 2026. And that's exactly what happened — which is why the announcement itself wasn't much of a banger, unlike the map's actual release. It had been playable on FACEIT long before that anyway, first in FMPONE's

Some maps become a personal curse. For years, that map for Nikola "NiKo" Kovač was Inferno — the place where, back in 2018, his first real dream of a Major fell apart. And then, on June 21, 2026, in the most fitting venue imaginable — Counter-Strike's cathedral in Cologne, the LANXESS Arena — on that very same Inferno, everything finally clicked into place.Falcons were closing out FURIA. Third map, the

Heading into IEM Cologne Major 2026, Vitality made no secret of how much this event meant to them. They wanted to become the first team ever to win three Majors in a row and put to rest any hope the community still had for real competition at the top of the pro scene. But in Cologne, Vitality didn't look anywhere near as confident — or as terrifying — as they