BLAST Premier 2021 Season: Tournament Statistics and Casters' Activity
BLAST Premier is one of the biggest and most popular professional CS:GO leagues, which is confirmed by the results of the year 2021. In a new Esports Charts we will talk in detail about the last year's season, which matches excited the most viewers, and which commentators were most frequently seen on the broadcasts.
BLAST Premier 2021 season statistics
The BLAST Premier season lasted for almost a whole year, from February to December. The final tournament of the series was the BLAST Premier World Final 2021. NAVI, the undisputed leader in the discipline throughout the fall, won the tournament.
The most popular tournament of the season was not the world finals, but the BLAST Premier Fall 2021 Finals, which was the first big event since the PGL Major Stockholm 2021. It managed to draw 861.4K Peak Viewers and 38.4K Average Viewers. The audience spent more than 17 million hours watching the tournament.
It should be noted that after NAVI won the first major in two years — PGL Major Stockholm 2021 — the audience of the following BLAST Premier tournaments increased by one and a half times.
The BLAST Premier Fall 2021 Showdown attracted the least attention from viewers. It was the only event in the series which was watched by fewer than 100K Average Viewers.
The English-speaking audience was the most active during the BLAST Premier Fall 2021 Finals. Three matches of this tournament made it into the Top 5. The grand final between NAVI and Team Vitality, which was commentated on by Scrawny and launders, attracted the highest number of Peak Viewers — 365.7K spectators.
Russian-speaking viewers were very focused on the BLAST Premier World Final 2021. Three of its matches were in the top 5 in terms of Peak Viewers number. The Grand Final with two teams from the CIS — NAVI and Gambit — was expectedly the most popular contest of the league, reaching 337.3K Peak Viewers. Strike and yXo commentated on the match.
Interestingly, the matches between NAVI and Vitality, with s1mple and ZywOo, two of the best players in the world in the last few years, attract an especially large number of viewers.
BLAST Premier 2021's most active casters
The most-watched caster of last year's BLAST Premier season, both in the English-language segment and overall, was Anders Blume. The Dane commentated on 52 matches, and viewers spent more than 16 million hours watching him.
Commentators Mohan "launders" Govindasamy and Conner "Scrawny" Girvan, who featured 54 broadcasts of matches, had 480K fewer Hours Watched — 15.61 million.
It is worth mentioning that in the English-language broadcast studio, unlike in the Russian-language one, there are fewer casters, but more well-established pairs of commentators. That is why there is such a big difference in Hours Watched and the number of matches commentated on.
Aleksei "yXo" Maletskyi was the most watched Russian-language caster at the BLAST Premier 2021. Viewers spent more than 9 million hours watching 43 matches featuring him. It is noteworthy that yXo has become a leader, starting to comment only in the fall season, when the rights to broadcast BLAST Premier were transferred to the WePlay Esports media holding. Recall that the league was covered for most of the year by Maincast, with Ded1ce as the leader with 2.82 million Hours Watched.
Yuri "strike" Tereshchenko and Alexander "Enkanis" Polishchuk rounded out the top three in the Russian-language segment casters. Strike made 34 match broadcasts and generated 6.55 million Hours Watched, while Enkanis had 31 match broadcasts and accumulated 4 million Hours Watched.
As previously mentioned, Mohan "launders" Govindasamy and Conner "Scrawny" Girvan each commentated on 54 games in last year's league season. The casters ranked first and second in this category, respectively.
Anders Blume was third with 52 matches, followed by yXo (43 matches) and strike (34 matches).
Masson's August Semmler was below his English-speaking colleagues with 33 matches, as he hadn't commentated on the BLAST Premier Fall 2021 Showdown and the BLAST Premier World Final 2021.
Launders and Scrawny were once again the leaders in the number of matches commentated on together. This pair of casters featured 47 match broadcasts. The duo of Andres Blume and Semmler ranked second in this category with 33 matches.
The remaining three positions in the ranking of popular BLAST Premier 2021 commentary pairs were taken by Russian-speaking duos: Enkanis + yXo (19 matches), strike + yXo (18 matches) and Ded1ce + LENINW (12 matches).
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While the BLAST Premier 2020 season had no clear leader, the 2021 season was undoubtedly dominated by the NAVI team. At the same time, the BLAST Premier audience increased by about 30%. The main voices of the 2021 season were Anders Blume in the English-speaking segment and Aleksei "yXo" Maletskyi in the Russian-speaking one. It is also worth mentioning Brazilian streamer Alexandre "Gaules" Borba, who actively covered BLAST Premier tournaments on his personal channel on Twitch.
