HEROIC played three best-of-three series in one day at DraculaN Season 7 in Bucharest, and FaZe played nine maps on the same day. Assistant coach Adrien “killazoo” Legarda wants Valve to set a limit for tournaments that count towards the Valve Regional Standings. Valve’s current rules for those events do not mention it.
HEROIC‘s Wednesday ended after midnight with a 2-1 defeat to FaZe in the lower bracket of DraculaN Season 7, a B-tier LAN at the Nexus Esports Hub in Bucharest. It was their third best-of-three of the day. While the deciding map was still being played, assistant coach Adrien “killazoo” Legarda posted his complaint on X and tagged Valve’s official Counter-Strike account.
He listed the day as a team walk at 10:00, a first best-of-three at 13:00, a second at 17:20 and a third against FaZe starting at 23:10. He wrote that “9 Maps a day should NOT be an option” and that he would “love some rules from @CounterStrike / Valve around this for players sake”. He also wrote that he misses RMRs, the Valve-sanctioned regional qualifiers that decided Major places before Valve began to fill the Major entirely through invitations from its regional standings.
About an hour and a half later, he added that he was not directly blaming DraculaN, since the problem is that no rules exist. He proposed a cap of two best-of-threes per day, or six possible maps on days with best-of-ones, and said it should then be up to the organisers to make their schedules fit.
The Frenchman joined HEROIC from OG as assistant coach in July. He works under head coach Snappi, who returned to the organisation on 1 October.
Three series in one day
HEROIC entered the playoffs as one of the eight highest VRS-ranked teams in the field and beat HYPERSPIRIT 2-0 on Tuesday. The loss to SINNERS in the upper bracket quarter-finals on Wednesday sent them down to the lower bracket, where two more series were scheduled for the same day.
HEROICUpper bracket quarter-final, scheduled : Mirage 13-8, Nuke 8-13, Dust2 13-5HEROIC2-0BBLLower bracket round 2, scheduled : Nuke 13-9, Inferno 16-12
FaZe2-1HEROICStatsLower bracket round 3, scheduled : Mirage 13-8, Ancient 9-13, Nuke 13-8
JBOEN
Neityu
jcobbb
MartinezSa
niloThat was eight maps and 174 rounds for HEROIC in one day. The last series was decided on Nuke, where FaZe led 7-5 at the half and closed it out 13-8. frozen was the best player in the series with a 1.15 rating, while MartinezSa’s 1.00 was the highest on the HEROIC side.
FaZe had an even longer day. They also started in the upper bracket quarter-finals and lost to JiJieHao before winning two more three-map series in the lower bracket.
| Start | Round | Opponent | Result | Maps |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Upper bracket quarter-final |  JiJieHao | 1-2 | Mirage 13-6, Dust2 9-13, Anubis 11-13 | |
| Lower bracket round 2 |  ENVY | 2-1 | Ancient 13-5, Dust2 9-13, Anubis 16-14 | |
| Lower bracket round 3 | HEROIC | 2-1 | Mirage 13-8, Ancient 9-13, Nuke 13-8 |
All three series went the distance, and the Anubis decider against ENVY needed overtime. In total, FaZe played nine maps and 199 rounds on Wednesday. A regulation map in the MR12 format lasts at most 24 rounds.
Built into the bracket
HEROIC and FaZe were not the only ones. The DraculaN playoffs are a 16-team double elimination bracket with best-of-three series throughout, played over four days from Tuesday to Friday. On Wednesday, the schedule fitted in the upper bracket quarter-finals, the second and third rounds of the lower bracket and the upper bracket semi-finals.
That meant all four teams who lost in the upper bracket quarter-finals had to play three series that day. BASEMENT BOYS lost to Eternal Fire and then beat Iberian Soul, both in three maps, before losing a third three-map series to Nexus. Nexus lost to BC.Game in three maps and then beat SAW and BASEMENT BOYS. Like FaZe, both teams played nine maps on Wednesday.
Nexus had already come through the group stage on Monday, when they played a best-of-one and two best-of-threes that both went to three maps, finishing with a decider that started at . Counting their three-map win over Luminosity on Tuesday, Nexus played 19 maps in three days.
The tournament rulebook, published on GitHub, gives teams ten minutes between maps and 30 minutes between consecutive matches. It also states that if a prior match runs long, “subsequent matches may have reduced break times”.
The rest of the schedule is lighter. The two lower bracket quarter-finals, the lower bracket semi-final and the upper bracket final are on Thursday, and the lower bracket final and the grand final on Friday. A team that wins the tournament from the lower bracket would play two series on each of the last two days, which is within the limit killazoo proposes.
What Valve’s rules say
Valve sets the conditions for tournaments that count towards the VRS in its Tournament Operation Requirements, published in the counter-strike_rules_and_regs repository on GitHub. The document covers invitations, wildcards, open qualifiers, announcement deadlines, prize money, conflicts of interest and equal treatment of teams. It does not say how many matches a team can play in a day or how much rest teams must have between them.
The closest it comes is a clause that requires equal treatment of all teams in the same stage of a tournament, including “preparation time”. The Major Supplemental Rulebook in the same repository describes the formats of the Major itself, but it also has no rule on matches per day.
DraculaN Season 7 is a VRS-ranked tier 2 event with open registration, according to its own rulebook. Any team from the global region could sign up for EUR 1,500 plus VAT, and the $35,000 prize pool is built entirely from those registration fees. The eight highest VRS-ranked teams that signed up, HEROIC and FaZe among them, were seeded directly into the playoffs.
Why the big names were there
Events like this matter because the Singapore Major is now filled entirely through the VRS. The invitations are based on the standings of Monday 2 November, and Europe has 18 places, as Pley explained earlier this week. In Valve’s most recent European list, from 5 October, HEROIC were 12th and FaZe 20th.
That has filled the calendar for teams near the cut-off. HEROIC came to Bucharest straight from Stake Pulse Beat III in Stockholm, where they finished third after a deciding match against 100 Thieves on Saturday. FaZe won Roman Imperium Cup IX in Portugal less than two weeks before the DraculaN playoffs started.
For HEROIC, the event is over. FaZe face s1mple‘s BC.Game in the lower bracket quarter-final on , and the winner plays the lower bracket semi-final at the same evening.
