idk if popularized is the right word because shotgun was still very much meta but harbleu ran it as pocket on mihalys flow

Probably lansky on froyo in terms of influence/marking the beginning of the shift.

I believe it was Tri.

I remember tri being one of the first to start using it regularly, besides that i remember of i55 where i think it was probably the first big event where almost all pockets started using gunboats

Wow it's been meta for much longer than I thought

Only vets remember. Some of us are still alive.

Harbleu was one of the first big NA names to try it in ESEA S11, among others, but wasn't really considered a "gunboats pocket" like Tri was through the next year of ESEA. After S14, double gunboats usage started to spread, with Lansky picking them up S15 on iT, S16-18 during OG Froyotech's championship run, and winning i52 in 2014.

Lansky seems more of an innovator here than is accurate. 0 disrespect to my goat but as mentioned Harb was experimenting with shoes and tri was full time running them, both at invite playoffs level, before Lanksy even joined the banny team.

After lansky started wearing shoes on HRG, the other pockets in the playoffs picture were TLR, Plat, rando/Ma3laa, and grape. TLR and Plat were both old-school style pockets and rando and grape were also committed to very heal-heavy roles across all their rosters for various reasons. This skewed the perception of the meta as most of the evolution was coming from the up and coming teams in the div, even from generally heal-heavy pockets like aim, show, and goldfish.

4 seasons after Tri in Mihaly's Flow was grape's first season of pocket. The only time since then that a playoffs caliber team has genuinely tried working a shotgun pocket was at the end of ESEA when Froyo had the idea to give the best player to have touched the game twice as many bullets to shoot.

as i guess a footnote i believe there were some euros experimenting with boats around the same as or even before ESEA S11 but i dont know anything about that fake bullshit

Had a chat with Yuki about this and the first person we ever saw running core double gunboats pocket full time with no exceptions in the top division of any league was the Australian player scotty. He was running full time gunboats pocket (and often using the suicidal role to class swap to a lot of spy/sniper) all the way back in 2010-12, in the first few ozfortress leagues. I don't think he moved to only playing that way until ozfortress league 2-3, but I don't have any way of getting demos from that era to work to nail it down much beyond that.

I agree with this HaXxorIzed guy.

In NA I do remember tri being an early adopter.

b4nny would know, let's all go kick his door down