Imperial fe, now Imperial Valkyries, made big waves in the Counter-Strike community at the beginning of this season, becoming the first women’s team to compete at a top-tier CS tournament.
Their invitations to IEM Katowice, BLAST Bounty, and PGL Cluj-Napoca were all granted through Valve’s new VRS system, with the team’s ranking points coming exclusively from female-only events.
Undeserved?
But was it fair that they received direct invites to these elite tournaments?
That’s a question that Imperial Valkyries’ in-game leader Viktoria “Tory” Kazieva openly reflected on in an interview with cyber.sports.ru, admitting that she doesn’t feel the invites were deserved.
– To be honest, I also think it was undeserved. It’s only because of Valve’s new system, and we earned the points at female tournaments. But anyway, what can we do? We aren’t going to decline these invites. Games against those players are a very useful experience.
– We are now even practising against top teams. Our last scrim was against Liquid. We never played against such rosters before, tory said.
How did top teams treat them?
In the same interview, Tory also shared her surprise at the level of respect they received from top teams, explaining that opponents took their matches against Imperial Valkyries far more seriously than expected.
– We were really respected. To be honest, we didn’t expect it. Before the match against NAVI our coach told us: “They’re going to make an anti-strategy” I then said: “Are you kidding? What kind of anti-strategy are they going to make? They’ll just come in for fun, run around, destroy us, and that’s it.” But it turned out that they were really making an anti-strategy against us.
– In Katowice, FURIA had a huge list of anti-strats prepared. In Romania [PGL Cluj-Napoca] against Eternal Fire, I expected them to pick an easy map against us, like Dust2 or Inferno. Why would they reveal their strategies on harder maps just to play against us? But they picked Nuke. That completely shocked me. They treated us like a serious opponent, and that was really cool.
The quotes from Tory have been translated from Russian to English.
Since the start of the year, Imperial Valkyries has dropped down to #55 on Valve’s global ranking, why they are currently out of contention for the bigger tournaments in pro Counter-Strike.
However, they are currently leading their group at ESL Impact League Season 7 Europe after two confident victories.
