March has a particular rhythm in esports. It’s the month when the early-season fog lifts and the contours of real power start revealing themselves. Some teams confirm what everyone suspected. Others quietly implode. And once in a while, a stand-in rewrites the whole narrative. This esports monthly review covers all three disciplines we follow at Nexus, and trust me, there’s a lot to unpack.
CS2: Vitality’s Reign Tightens, NAVI’s Emotional Rollercoaster
The biggest story in Counter-Strike this March belongs to two tournaments that essentially split the month in half and told two completely different tales about the same team.
Natus Vincere opened the month by winning ESL Pro League Season 23 in Stockholm. Their first trophy of 2026 came on the back of a 3-1 grand final victory over Aurora, with makazze earning the tournament MVP at a blistering 1.38 rating across the event. For a NAVI roster that endured months of skepticism after jL’s departure and the mid-season rebuild, Stockholm felt like a vindication moment. B1ad3 had spoken candidly during the event about the team’s firepower deficit, but makazze’s emergence as a legitimate star seems to have answered that concern with authority.
Then came BLAST Open Rotterdam (March 18-29), and reality checked in.
Team Vitality swept NAVI 3-0 in the grand final with wins on Inferno (13-7), Anubis (13-10), and Dust2 (13-10), claiming their third consecutive Big Event title and stretching their map win streak to 22 maps and their series win streak to 16. ropz took the MVP honors for a performance that combined mechanical precision with the kind of tactical awareness that separates generational players from merely great ones. NAVI had their moments during the series, but Vitality’s brilliance in clutch situations and on anti-eco rounds exposed the gap that still exists between the world’s number one team and everyone else.
For those keeping track, Vitality entered 2026 having won nine major tournaments in 2025, including both Majors and the ESL Grand Slam Season 5. Dominance of this magnitude hasn’t been seen in Counter-Strike since the Astralis three-peat era (2018-2019), and an argument could be made that Vitality’s current stretch is more impressive given the depth of competition in the open circuit. ZywOo joked in a pre-final interview that the team has “a second donk” on the roster. He wasn’t entirely wrong.
The G2-Liquid Swap
Mid-March brought the most consequential roster move of the spring. G2 Esports and Team Liquid completed a player swap: NertZ moved to G2, while malbsMd headed to Liquid. For G2, the deal reunites NertZ with coach sAw and SunPayus from their productive ENCE days. The Israeli rifler’s rating had dipped to 1.05 during his Liquid stint, well below the 1.12+ he maintained during his Rookie of the Year campaign in 2023. The familiarity factor could be what he needs.
For Liquid, the situation is more existential. The North American organization has been bleeding VRS points all season, and acquiring malbsMd serves a dual purpose: fresh firepower and, critically, re-establishing their Americas VRS standing. With IEM Cologne Major invites locked to the April 6 cutoff, both teams were racing to play five official matches with their new lineups. Rotterdam didn’t go well for Liquid; they fell to The MongolZ 2-0 in the group stage and exited before the quarterfinals. The clock is ticking.
Also Noteworthy
PARIVISION continued their impressive 2026 run, reaching the semifinals at Rotterdam before falling to NAVI. BELCHONOKK was outstanding in their quarterfinal dismantling of Falcons. Aurora, semifinalists at both EPL and Rotterdam, are quietly establishing themselves as a consistent top-eight presence, with XANTARES delivering some of his best form in years.
Dota 2: Yandex’s Cinderella Run, Tundra’s Birmingham Coronation
March delivered two Tier 1 Dota 2 tournaments and two very different champions. What they had in common was a theme that defined the entire month: visa chaos, stand-ins, and the question of how deep an organization’s roster really goes.
PGL Wallachia Season 7: The Stand-In Who Stole the Show
PGL Wallachia Season 7 (March 7-15, Bucharest, $1,000,000) was supposed to feature many of the scene’s biggest names. Instead, visa issues ripped through the participant list. Tundra lost star carry Pure. Falcons were without Malr1ne. Aurora played without Nightfall. And Team Yandex had to replace offlaner Noticed with DM, a benched PARIVISION player who hadn’t played a Tier 1 official in months.
Nobody expected what happened next.
Yandex opened with a 0-2 loss to HEROIC that looked like an early exit in the making. Then something clicked. They beat MOUZ 2-1, the defending Wallachia champions, and never looked back. Through the Swiss stage they went, through the upper bracket they went, sweeping Team Liquid 2-0 in the upper bracket semis and dismantling BetBoom 2-0 in the upper bracket final. By the time they reached the grand final, Yandex hadn’t just survived without Noticed; they had been the most dominant team in the entire bracket.
Team Liquid, meanwhile, took the scenic route. After falling to Yandex in the upper bracket, they clawed back through HEROIC, Team Spirit, and then BetBoom in a lower bracket final that lasted approximately 225 minutes across three maps, one of the longest Bo3 series in professional Dota 2 history. By the time they sat down for the grand final rematch, Liquid had played roughly 12 hours of Dota in a single day.
The grand final was a 3-2 epic. Yandex stormed to a 2-0 lead with two ruthless sub-40-minute wins. Liquid, somehow finding reserves of energy that defied logic, roared back with a 72-minute marathon in game three and a clinical 35-minute game four to level the series. The decider went 56 minutes, and it was Yandex who held their nerve. CHIRA_JUNIOR on Invoker finished with 13 kills, 22 assists, and 5 deaths. Watson on Luna posted 8/1/25. DM on Bristleback closed his stand-in stint with 10/4/26. Three hundred thousand dollars and their second Tier 1 title after DreamLeague Season 27 in December.
For Liquid, $175,000 and a finals appearance after that marathon confirmed their quality. But the fatigue told the story.
ESL One Birmingham: Tundra Reasserts Dominance
Two weeks later, a very different tournament unfolded. ESL One Birmingham 2026 (March 22-29, $1,000,000) brought the full-strength rosters back, and Tundra Esports demonstrated why they remain the team to beat in 2026 Dota.
With Pure back in the lineup, Tundra looked like a different animal from the incomplete squad that finished 5th-6th at Wallachia. The narrative practically wrote itself: Team Yandex, riding the high of their Bucharest triumph, met Tundra in the grand final. Yandex took map one, briefly threatening a repeat of their spring dominance. But Tundra responded with a grinding 60+ minute second map before winning the next two convincingly for a 3-1 victory.
Birmingham confirmed what many already suspected: a fully healthy Tundra, with bzm’s mid-game rotations and 33’s trademark offlane versatility, remain a tier above the competition. Their DreamLeague Season 28 title (won March 1 over Aurora 3-1) and now Birmingham give them two Tier 1 trophies in the 2026 calendar year, plus the top spot on the EPT leaderboard.
The question going into April is who can challenge them. Team Falcons, TI 2025 champions, have looked inconsistent. Team Spirit were eliminated in the Swiss stage at Wallachia and fell to Xtreme Gaming 1-2 in Birmingham’s lower bracket. Yandex proved they belong at the absolute top, but sustaining that level with a full roster and without the underdog adrenaline will be the real test. Liquid showed heart and skill but need to convert deep runs into trophies.
League of Legends: BLG Break the Curse, G2 Almost Rewrite History
March in League was defined by three seismic events: the conclusion of LEC Versus, the LPL Split 1 final, and the First Stand 2026 international tournament in Sรฃo Paulo.
G2 Esports claimed their 18th European title by defeating Karmine Corp 3-2 in the LEC Versus grand final at Barcelona’s Olympic Arena on March 1. The series went the full distance, with Caps earning Finals MVP for the seventh time, his 16th personal domestic trophy. G2’s playoff run was vintage: despite finishing sixth in the regular season, they swept through the upper bracket without dropping a game, including a 3-0 demolition of Movistar KOI in the winners’ final. Karmine Corp, who topped the regular season at 8-3, fought their way through the entire lower bracket to force a rematch. The final peaked at approximately 730,000 viewers, the split’s highest.
In China, Bilibili Gaming defeated JD Gaming 3-1 to win LPL Split 1, a result that carried extra weight given the offseason upheaval. Both FunPlus Phoenix and Royal Never Give Up, two of the league’s most storied organizations, exited the LPL entirely before the season began. FPX left in November, and RNG confirmed their departure in January after financial issues and a court-imposed penalty of CNยฅ 160 million. The league dropped to 14 teams, yet the competition remained fierce. BLG vs. JDG peaked at 251,000 viewers on international platforms, making it the most popular LPL event outside China in two years.
First Stand 2026: Sรฃo Paulo Belongs to Bilibili
The crown jewel of the month was First Stand 2026 (March 16-22, Sรฃo Paulo, $1,000,000). Eight regional champions and finalists gathered for the season’s first international event, and BLG delivered a statement.
After sweeping JD Gaming 3-0 in the semifinals, Bilibili faced G2 Esports in the grand final. G2 had earned their spot through a breathtaking lower bracket run that included a 3-0 upset of Gen.G, a result that peaked at 1.46 million viewers. But the final belonged to BLG. They lost game one, then took three straight for a 3-1 victory. Bin earned Finals MVP after posting on Weibo the night before that he would prove he was the best top laner in the world. Viper became the first player to win First Stand twice, having won the inaugural edition with Hanwha Life Esports in 2025.
The grand final peaked at over 1.5 million concurrent viewers. For the LPL, it was their first international title since MSI 2023. For G2, the silver lining is real: their first international final in 2,323 days (since Worlds 2019) showed that Europe’s best can still compete at the absolute peak. But the gap between BLG and everyone else in that bracket was undeniable.
The result also carries structural consequences: BLG’s win gives the LPL’s second seed a direct bye into the MSI 2026 bracket stage.
The Broader Picture: What This Esports March 2026 Recap Tells Us
The emerging theme across all three titles is the reassertion of established dynasties and the struggle of challengers to close the gap. Vitality in CS2, Tundra in Dota 2, and BLG in League share a common trait: they don’t just win tournaments, they win them in a way that makes the opposition look a tier below. The teams chasing them have talent, sometimes exceptional talent, but consistency at the highest level remains the hardest currency to earn.
The transfer market in CS2 heated up significantly, with the NertZ-malbsMd swap being the headline move. Dota 2’s roster instability showed a different angle at Wallachia, where visa issues forced multiple top teams to play with stand-ins, turning the tournament into a referendum on organizational depth. In League, the post-RNG/FPX landscape in China has stabilized faster than many expected, and BLG’s international triumph suggests that the LPL’s talent pool runs deep enough to absorb even the loss of legacy franchises.
April brings the IEM Cologne Major qualification deadline in CS2, PGL Wallachia Season 8 in Dota, and the continuation of LEC Spring and the start of LCK Rounds 1-2 in League. The stakes only go up from here.
