YaLLa Compass Qatar 2025’s group stage has been gutted, but ENCE and Spirit Academy will look to keep things interesting.
The BLAST Austin Major is looming large over the spring, but it has lots of company. PGL Bucharest, IEM Dallas, PGL Astana, BLAST Rivals Spring, IEM Melbourne, and the list goes on. That left top teams having to pick and choose which events they’re going to bother with.
For many of them, YaLLa Compass Qatar didn’t make the cut. ENCE stuck with it while Spirit Academy got a replacement invite. But which of these two teams will win when they face off?
ENCE and Team Spirit Academy are set to face off in group stage of YaLLa Compass Qatar 2025 on April 17, 2025. The match is a best-of-one. YaLLa Compass uses a round robin format for its group stage, so both teams will have four more best-of-one matches after this.
What happened with CS in 2024?
Though ENCE was previously an elite Counter-Strike team, these days it has been grinding on the regional scene and in qualifiers for prominent events. It has posted mixed results along the way, ranging from winning Elisa Masters Espoo 2024 to getting bullied by NaVi’s academy team.
Former Astralis star Lukas “gla1ve” Rossander still leads the ENCE roster as the organization ships off its best players:
ENCE’s go-to map over the last six months has been Ancient, playing there in 27 of its 91 maps during that stretch. It has a 59% winrate. Its winningest map, however, has been Anubis, where it has an 8-4 record. ENCE has been actively avoiding playing on Inferno during that time.
Spirit Academy has been playing in various European and Russian Counter-Strike leagues with a generally stable roster. It was on a bit of a hot streak in late 2024, winning and placing highly in ESEA and CCT leagues. It cooled off considerably in 2025 for some reason, but managed to win the all-Russian LanDaLan event in February.
Despite being an academy team, Spirit Academy has had a stable roster since March 2024:
Spirit Academy has a very high winrate on Dust 2, Ancient, Mirage, and Anubis so far in 2025, winning at least two-thirds of its games on each of those maps. The team is 7-8 on Nuke, but has been struggling on Train at 3-7. The odd map out is Inferno, which Spirit Academy auto-bans.
ENCE and Spirit Academy have played each other just once in Counter-Strike 2. That match came in CCT Season 2 Europe 15, which Spirit Academy won 2-0. That match had a competitive showdown on Mirage and a 13-3 stomp on Vertigo, which is no longer in the rotation.
ENCE is a narrow 1.66 favorite to beat Team Spirit Academy in YaLLa Compass Qatar. The underdog line on TSA sits at 2.14. Neither team has been consistent and this is a best-of-one, meaning there’s a high amount of variance here
ENCE should be able to get the win over Spirit Academy. While sports betting sites have this one as close to a toss-up, ENCE is a definitive tier higher than Spirit Academy. As such, gla1ve and company should be able to get the win, even if it doesn’t necessarily come quickly.
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