CommunityFortress

Hello, it's Adam from TF2Strategy here, from now on I'm hopefully going to be bringing you a roundup of the top level European leagues; I thought that I'd start my coverage of the European scene now, after a match between Button Bashers and Thermaltake. These are the two teams that are predicted to top the premier division. These teams are the only two 'known' premier teams.

The other premier teams left ETF2L due to the ‘cinnamon’ ruleset that was proposed. There was a split in opinion, the majority of teams in the higher levels were in favour of vanilla + medlocks, whereas the lower divisions preferred the inclusion of more unlocks. As a result big name teams such as Epsilon and Dignitas quit ETF2L for ESL. A lot of the teams in the premier division are relatively unknown, teams like k1ck have been promoted to overcome the shortfall of teams, this will make it a very interesting and unpredictable season for the premier season. Here are the predictions for ESL courtesy of Honeymustard

Granary and Gravelpit were the two maps that were played. It kicked off with Button Bashers taking Granary 3 – 2. There’s not much that I can say about the match because the TF2TV stream was only up for the final few minutes. Surprisingly numlocked made a surprise appearance, according to Ronny Bash was going to demo, Ronny was going scout and tba was going to medic. Numlocked played a very aggressive game and dealt a lot of damage, overall a very close game!

Gravelpit saw some great use of the utilities, with Stefan and Fisshu both rocking the pyro to great effect, both of them managed to deflect crit stickies and a huge amount of rocket spam. Bash also used the heavy very well, levitating Thermaltake's jumping soldiers and denying their uber from having any effect.  Interestingly Button Bashers opted to run an engineer on defence, whereas Thermaltake didn't. On the second round Stefan managed to surf one of Kaidus’s stickies and saved his sentry gun which further prolonged the game. Button Bashers took Gravelpit as well 2 - 0.


A great game with Button Bashers taking both games, kudos to TF2TV for casting the game and VanillaTF2 for advertising it. Curiously enough the people over at VanillaTF2 voted for Thermaltake to win both maps, this could have been because Thy, the demo for Button Bashers recently left the team.