CS:GO : Team Liquid release Pimp

Team Liquid have released Jacob "Pimp" Winneche according to an announcement on social media.

View image on Twitter

Pimp requested a transfer from the team in March, saying "I no longer feel that playing for Liquid fulfills my personal expectations & goals," in a statement.

The Danish player joined Liquid in June 2016 to replace Oleksandr "S1mple" Kostyliev, though S1mple stayed on with the team for the ECS Season 1 Finals and the Cologne Major 2016. Pimp previously played with SK Gaming and Team Dignitas.

"It's been one hell of a ride, and an experience I will never forget," Pimp wrote in an Instagram post. "A big thank you goes out to all of the awesome staff, and all of the amazing players I've crossed path with. On to the next adventure, hook me up!"

Sasha Erfanian is a news editor for theScore esports. You can follow him on Twitter.

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is a game dominated by the West. Of the 10 Majors that have taken place so far, eight have been won by Europeans, while two crowned South American champions.

Meanwhile, Asia, a region that has historically dominated much of the esports space, hasn't been able to qualify for a single one.

Much of this could be blamed on Asia's smaller CS:GO player base, and by extension talent pool.

"The biggest problem for the competitive scene in China right now is the lack of young talent," TyLoo International Executive Chang "Marshall" Luo said in an interview with theScore esports. "Because there is no crisis of losing their job, the current professional players lack motivation.

"So if we can grow the player base, more young players who are eager to prove themselves join the scene, they also give pressure to the old players. That's the way the competitive scene grows."

In years past, before the Major system and the latest iteration of CS, Asian teams competed among Counter-Strike's upper echelon. But with the lack of an official CS:GO release in China and a historically fractured competitive scene, the region's progression has been stifled and stunted.

With an official Chinese release of CS:GO from Perfect World already in beta and set to drop soon, China is primed to make up for lost time. And any success in China will surely send influential ripples throughout Asia.

Counter-Strike's fractured communities

CS fans in the West should by now be familiar with the competitive scene and how it developed in EU and NA, from a Half-Life mod developed by two people to one of the most-watched esports ever. But China's history with the game was slightly different, to the detriment of their professional scene.

Competitive CS largely started in 2000 and it remained stable until 2004, with the release of the game's sequel Counter-Strike: Source. It was at this point that the CS community at large split in two, with some jumping ship to Source, while the majority stayed with 1.6.

While the 1.6 scene was dominated by Europe, there were still a handful of American and Asian teams that were competitive at a high level. For Asia, teams like wNv and TyLoo from China and Hacker.Project (later e-STRO, WeMade FOX and project_kr) from South Korea, could go toe-to-toe with the likes of Fnatic, SK Gaming and mousesports, even winning some events over them.

"CS was super popular in China 15 years ago, it was like StarCraft in Korea, I should say," Marshall said. "If you say the word 'CS,' almost everyone in China knows it is a shooting game."

2012 saw the release of CS:GO, which, despite its own flaws, served to eventually unite the 1.6 and Source communities.

However, this was not the case in China. With no official release of CS:GO, the closest official matchmaking server for Chinese players was Singapore, which offered at best a 150-200 latency connection — too slow for even casual play. This made the only viable servers in China third-party ones, giving way to only a small, dedicated community.

To muddy the competitive waters even further, Asian tournament organizers switched over to hosting events on Counter-Strike Online (CSO) around this time.

Read More : Score Esports