paiN Gaming’s brTT complains about lack of scrims at MSI 2021

paiN Gaming bot laner Felipe “brTT” Gonçalves recently made a public complaint about the scrim environment at the 2021 Mid-Season Invitational. 

The Brazilian team participated at MSI 2021 during the group stage, where they competed against the likes of MAD Lions, PSG Talon, and Istanbul Wildcats. While the practice on stage was great for paiN Gaming, the same can’t be said about the practice between official matches. According to brTT, there was a serious lack of scrims available to the Brazilian side as teams didn’t want to scrim them. 

In a statement on Twitter, the Brazilian star player shared his frustrations about teams wanting to interact with the Brazilians on social media but not wanting to practice against them. 

“It’s incredible how the international teams interact with Brazilians on social media to gain engagement,” brTT said. “But they don’t want to scrim with us at Worlds or at MSI.”

It seems that the high-tier teams at MSI have been carefully choosing who they practice against, while teams from the wildcard regions are left out in the cold. With paiN Gaming playing in the same group as MAD Lions and PSG Talon, the teams available were already limited. 

Besides the MSI teams, it’s very common that the team scrim against other teams from the region where an international tournament takes place. In this case that would be LEC teams, but it doesn’t seem like paiN Gaming managed to get much practice against those. According to paiN Gaming jungler Marcos “Cariok” Oliveira, the team only got practice against other wildcard teams at the tournament. 

G2 Wunder talks about scrimming MSI teams

The fact that paiN Gaming has only practiced against other wildcard teams strange weird in a region with prominent practice partners from the LEC, but it might be the reality of the situation. It’s known that G2 Esports has been scrimming against MSI teams, but it doesn’t seem like every team has gotten the chance to practice against the defending MSI champions.

On a recent podcast, G2 top laner Martin “Wunder” Hansen talked about how they have been scrimming Royal Never Give Up, PSG Talon, and Cloud9. The Danish top laner mentioned that they didn’t scrim any wildcard teams, which would include paiN Gaming.

“We didn’t play any wildcard teams because we didn’t want to play Pentanet,” Wunder said. “We played Cloud9, RNG, and PSG.”

brTT and paiN Gaming didn’t make it through to the rumble stage of MSI, after going 2-4 in the group stage. paiN Gaming will now return to Brazil where they will fight in the upcoming summer split for another shot at international success at the 2021 World Championship.