Team Vitality vs Origen

Next up, we have a strange one: Origen vs. Team Vitality. On paper, this is about as one-sided a match as we can get. In reality, however, it's absolute chaos. Now, make no mistake: Origen is still favored to get the win and will probably blow Vitality out of the water, but neither team has impressed over the last couple of weeks. The fact that Vitality looks pretty bad didn't come as much of a surprise, given their level of play from last split.

The fact that Origen looks much worse than they did mere weeks ago, however, is quite perplexing. It's not like anything changed, and yet they're much slower to react and have been making egregious mistakes regardless of whom they were up against. This simply isn't the clean, macro-oriented Origen we've become accustomed to, and no one's quite sure who's to blame. Alphari is still dominant beyond measure, but Xerxe and Nukeduck are nowhere near as consistent. One game they'll look like absolute giants and then they'll crumble the very day, without any apparent reason. As things stand, Origen is barely a Top 5 team, and that's really saying something. They're not as good as MAD Lions and their loss to Rogue yesterday (a game in which Rogue didn't have the edge early on) gives us a reason for concern.

Obviously, knowing Origen, they'll improve and put up a much better fight with time but the fact that they're struggling this much makes every match going forward that much harder to predict. Will they draft well? Will they impose their will from the very get-go, or will they implode without any apparent reason and just fall apart in the mid and late game? These days it's always a coin toss which makes betting on/against them much harder than we'd like.

Vitality, on the other hand, started off well with a couple of surprising wins, but the way in which they lost yesterday to Excel Esports was absolutely horrendous. They didn't look good or bad -- they looked like they didn't belong in the LEC. This was, without a doubt, one of the worst performances you'll see all year, and that's really saying something given just how bad Vitality was mere months ago back in Spring. Individual mistakes and no team cohesion to speak of were on full display from start to finish. It was an absolute debacle in every sense of the word and they simply need to step up before it's too late.

Obviously, Origen should be favored even on a bad day, but their own inherent inconsistencies makes this game somewhat dangerous betting-wise. Still, their talent and experience should persevere.