Danil "donk" Kryshkovets just picked up his tenth Big Event MVP trophy, passing Nikola "NiKo" Kovač into sole fourth place on the all-time list, after Team Spirit beat MOUZ 3-1 in the BLAST Open Porto grand final on September 6. If that scoreline sounds familiar, it should. MOUZ beat Spirit by that exact same margin five weeks earlier in the BLAST Bounty Summer final, so this was a direct receipt getting returned in the same city they'd have preferred to avoid.
The series itself didn't stay tense for long. Spirit opened on Dust II and took it 13-8, MOUZ clawed back on Mirage 13-11 in the only map that actually felt like a fight, and then Spirit closed it out hard, 13-3 on Ancient and 13-6 on Nuke. A best-of-five that the bracket built up as a coin flip ended up being fairly one-sided once Spirit found their rhythm. The semifinals the day before told the same story in miniature: Spirit swept reigning Major champions Falcons 2-0, and MOUZ swept a Vitality squad playing with a stand-in. Both finalists arrived having barely been tested.
This is Spirit's second consecutive trophy after their Esports World Cup win, and it's the kind of momentum that starts making other top teams nervous heading into whatever comes next on the calendar. $250,000 went to first place out of a $1.1 million pool, with $150,000 of that split among the players directly. There's also a longer game happening here that's easy to miss: BLAST splits a separate $2 million revenue-share pool across the year by tokens, and a BLAST Open win is worth three tokens against one for the runner-up. Win enough of these and the gap between first and second compounds well past the trophy check.
The Patch Notes Problem Nobody's Talking About
Here's where I have to flag something odd. Multiple sources describe a CS2 update that reworks bomb damage into a spreading shockwave (instead of the old instant flat-radius calculation), adds a health bar preview so you can actually see if you'll survive a plant before deciding to hold or bail, and formally moves Cache into the Premier map pool as part of "Season 5." One outlet dates this whole rework to July 9. A completely separate outlet describes what reads like the identical patch, same mechanics, same Cache addition, same Season 5 framing, and dates it to September 2.
Those can't both be the shipping date for the same patch. Either one of these dates is just wrong (a republish with stale metadata is the most likely explanation), or Valve somehow shipped near-identical mechanical changes twice, which would be bizarre and I've found nothing suggesting that actually happened. I'm not going to pretend I know which date is correct, but if you're trying to pin down exactly when the bomb rework went live, don't trust either source blind, check Valve's own Steam news feed directly before you cite a date anywhere that matters.
What isn't in dispute: the bomb damage change itself is a genuinely good design decision. Instant flat-radius damage that ignored walls and geometry always felt cheap when you died to a bomb plant three rooms away because the game didn't care about the corner you were hiding behind. A shockwave that respects walls but can still wrap around corners is a much more honest simulation of how an explosion actually behaves, and giving players a health preview the moment the bomb becomes audible removes a whole category of "I didn't know I'd die" frustration from competitive play.