9z shocks Vitality, wrecks 98% of Pick’Em Stage 3

In the IEM Cologne Major 2026 Stage 3, 9z Team caused a massive “Pick’Em” disruption: 98% of Valve’s official Pick’Em participants had predicted Team Vitality would dominate the stage, but 9z delivered a reverse sweep instead. Match details show how the upset unfolded. 9z lost Inferno 4-13, then bounced back on Mirage (13-9) and closed the series on Dust2 (13-11). The result shattered near-unanimous consensus in the Pick’Em challenge, leaving almost all community brackets wrong. Valve’s Pick’Em is a widely used Major prediction game where players forecast team outcomes (e.g., 3-0, 3-1/3-2, or 0-3). With Vitality backed by the overwhelming majority, 9z’s win turned the “expected” tournament narrative into a cautionary tale about consensus thinking. Since 9z represents South America—often an underdog region in tier-one Counter-Strike—their Stage 3 run also highlights how volatile the current Major format has been. With only about 2% of brackets picking 9z correctly, the remaining stages are effectively a scramble, not a clean slate. For traders, the key takeaway is not on-chain activity, but behavioral: when a heavily forecast outcome flips, it can rapidly change risk sentiment across online communities and markets tied to attention flows. Here, the disruption was immediate and extreme, driven by a single reverse sweep that invalidated most “expected” scenarios.