ESB brings you best bets and top odds for the opening round of Group D matches at ESL Pro League Season 13 on Thursday, March 25. Here are our Counter-Strike: Global Offensive betting predictions for Virtus.pro vs Endpoint, Fnatic vs Team Liquid, and Astralis vs Evil Geniuses.

?You don’t have to be the best CS:GO analyst to know how this game should end. Virtus.pro might not be the powerhouse they were in the earlier days of CS:GO esports, but they were good enough to reach the IEM Katowice finals last month, and that counts for something.

Endpoint, meanwhile, are arguably the weakest team in the ESL Pro League and will have a hard time making it out of the group, let alone competing for the title. Although they’ve done well enough to earn their spot, Max “MiGHTYMAX” Heath and co. aren’t really used to playing top-tier teams, so they might be in for a shock on Thursday.

We won’t go too deep into what makes VP a much stronger team and why they’re rightfully priced as short favourites. Anything less than a 2-0 win for the CIS squad would be a massive disappointment, so the -1.5 handicap is the way to go.

?It’s quite saddening to see how low Fnatic have fallen. The three-time CS:GO Major Championship winners haven’t done anything worth mentioning for the past few years, and recent showings suggest they won’t be achieving anything of note anytime soon.

Team Liquid are in a similar position having failed to win a single tournament since ESL Pro League S11: NA, although they looked fairly solid at IEM Katowice, where they made it to the semi-finals only to get swept by Virtus.pro (9-16, 12-16). It’s worth noting that Liquid were at the time still adapting to their new in-game leader, Gabriel “FalleN” Toledo, so it’s fair to say they should perform better now that they’re all on the same page.

We have a hard time making a case for Fnatic, who haven’t shown enough for us to believe they can defeat Liquid. We would go even so far as to say that Liquid can easily win this match 2-0, which makes the -1.5 line hard to pass on at $2.57 odds.

?Astralis enter the ESL Pro League as $2.20 favourites to top Group D. While those odds are fair enough, we don’t expect the Danes to show their full might on Thursday.

Astralis’ last official match took place almost a month ago when they lost against Virtus.pro (1-2) in the quarter-finals of IEM Katowice. While we are not too concerned with them losing against VP, it’s more the fact that Astralis haven’t been active since then. Evil Geniuses have also not played a single match since IEM Katowice, but situations like this usually favour the weaker side.

We don’t expect Evil Geniuses to defeat Astralis, but they should be at least capable of stealing one map. Astralis are also not as strong as they once were, so it’s not like they can consistently demolish any top-tier team like they did back in 2018-2019.