The Valorant Champions Tour (VCT) Pacific League 2023 kickstarted on March 25, 2023, in Seoul, South Korea. The tournament features ten participating teams, all of which are Asian esports organizations that joined hands with Riot Games to enter their Valorant partnership model.
The Pacific League started with an eight-week-long league stage that will eventually make way for the playoffs. The tournament will conclude by shortlisting the three teams that will represent the region at this year’s only Valorant Masters event, which will be held in Tokyo.
DRX has consistently been one of the best teams in Asia, if not the best, since the earliest days of VCT. Although they haven’t managed to win a cross-regional tournament yet, they have far outclassed all other teams from Asia. It is no surprise, therefore, that Valorant esports fans from Asia have their hopes riding on DRX being one of the three Pacific teams to make it to Tokyo.
DRX’s coach termi speaks about the match against Global Esports at VCT 2023: Pacific League 2023
DRX won against ZETA DIVISION in their Week 1 match in VCT Pacific League. Although the Korean giants won 2-0 against Global Esports in their second match of the league stage, it was much more of an uphill battle.
So much so that coach Pyeon “termi” Seon-ho had to call all four timeouts throughout the series. This was such an unusual phenomenon that even the casters were taken aback. When Sportskeeda Esports asked him about the same, he responded:
“I normally let the players play through by themselves, but today I felt like I had to intervene since they were playing such a great team, and they (Global Esports) were playing better than I expected them to, which made me feel like I needed to call the timeouts for today.”
While that doesn’t take anything away from DRX’s status as a super team, it adds much credit to Global Esports’ potential to make it out of the league stage and possibly even into Masters Tokyo as they gain more and more experience over the weeks.
termi further commented on the difficulties their opponents posed for them during the match. He said:
“For the first map, Haven, we both lost the pistol rounds, which made the map tough for us. In the second map, however, Monyet was a beast on the map and I don’t think it would be that competitive without that.”
Indeed, Cahya “Monyet” Nugraha truly popped off over the 32 rounds the map ran for, setting a new record for the most kills in a single VCT map. For context as to how impactful that was in the game, the closest person to Monyet in that match was MaKo in the DRX squad with 31 kills.
The action of the VCT Pacific League is just heating up, and while DRX is expected to reign supreme, Global Esports also seems to have a bright future ahead of itself if it can maintain its footing.