Thai CS:GO Team NKT Qualifies for LAN Finals of Skyesports Championship 4.0 in Mumbai

Team NKT, a professional CS:GO team from Thailand, has been the first team to qualify for the LAN Finals of the Skyesports Championship 4.0 later on this month in Mumbai, India, and it’s only fitting that an Asian-based team is the first to qualify. They qualified through the SEA region qualifiers, defeating Aravt 3-2 in a best-of-five format. They defeated Kintsugi and Renewal in the group stage, followed by the victory against the Mongolian side Aravt in the final.

The battle was tense and tight the whole way, and the results for each map were the following:

• Inferno: NKT 16-13
• Ancient: Aravt 16-10
• Mirage: NKT 16-7
• Nuke: Aravt 16-9
• Overpass: NKT 16-12

NKT will be joined by the winner of the India qualifier, and the finals match will take place in front of a live audience in Mumbai. The CS:GO finals will occur simultaneously with the finals from both Dota 2 and Pokemon UNITE. The event is expected to bring some extra popularity to India for primarily CS:GO and Dota 2, both of which are not as popular in India as in other Asian countries.

Skyesports CEO Shiva Nandy mentioned that the company was willing to invest $500,000 next year in 2023 to help grow these games within India, so that possible future events and maybe even Majors can be held in India. This may be surprising to some people, considering how large of a country India is, but the growth of these two games just simply hasn’t happened yet at a large scale, and Nandy understands the importance of growing them, hence his pledge to invest.

The tournament is set to be one of the bigger tournaments in India to date, with $25,000 in prizes. The second phase of the India qualifiers began yesterday on December 9th, and we will be playing down to a winner to meet Team NKT in the LAN finals. A victory for Team NKT would be gigantic for Thailand, who has little representation on the CS:GO circuit, and would draw some attention to their country and lay the framework for not just growth in Thailand, but the chance to recruit even better talent and compete for Major championships down the road.