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Asia is by no means considered a powerhouse region in CS. Never has been, and at present, it still isn’t. But what happens when five of a country’s best assemble on one roster? You get the greatest Asian team in the history of Counter-Strike. For the longest time, The MongolZ were always viewed as a “very good” team and consistently one of the best from Asia.

Pablo Escobar 5 posts Hello fellow CS enthusiast! I am Pablo “VdaK1NG” Escobar (yes, it is indeed my real name haha). I have been part of the spanish CS community over the last decade, working first as a coach for a couple years, and later moving to analyst and management roles.

Welcome back everyone to the scouting series. In the previous piece we focused on how players perform in full buy rounds, and now we will finish the economic dimensions by including performance in anti-ecos and force buys. Just like in the previous pieces, we will be using data from 69 different tournaments, and 4590 maps, including 476 players with more than 30 maps, all over 2024.

Boston 2018. Stockholm 2021. Copenhagen 2024. Shanghai 2024. The four most heartbreaking defeats of Nikola “NiKo” Kovač’s career at Counter-Strike Majors. Every time, you’d think it was finally the tournament for him to win his crown. The one thing lacking in his trophy cabinet. Yet, Major after Major, NiKo’s greatest dream eludes him.

Born to Win. That is quite literally what Natus Vincere means when translated into English. No matter how you look at it, the organization has proven time after time that they live up to their name while shattering expectations along the way. They left an indelible mark on the game in the final years of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and now in the early days of Counter-Strike 2, a new-look NAVI is back.

After the BLAST Paris Major 2023, the world was Cai “CYPHER” Watson’s oyster. Having turned heads with his breakout performances, particularly on Vertigo, a tier 1 move beckoned. At the end of 2024, though, it’s been a somewhat chastening experience for the 21-year-old. His first move to TSM was fraught with controversy and suffered after the exit of coach Remy “XTQZZZ” Quoniam to Vitality.

Will the open circuit kill the prestige of World Number 1? The Counter-Strike scene has been abuzz with speculation over the consequences of Valve’s tournament rules, ranging from optimism for a truly open circuit to skepticism that the new system will allow new rosters to emerge and quickly climb the ranks. But what ranks we’re referring to and those ranks mean might be drastically about to change in 2025. The HLTV rankings have been the de facto world rankings for almost a decade.

Over the last three years, Impact has been dominated by Imperial Valkyries (Formerly Pigeons, Nigma Galaxy). Right behind them, trying to keep up, have been NAVI Javelins. With dominant placing from all the players with their respective nations recently at IESF, now is the perfect time to talk about a team I think has the best opportunity to step out of Imperial’s shadow and claim a LAN trophy for the cabinet.

Welcome everyone to the scouting series. In the next ten articles, we will be studying what aspects of the game make every player special, and how we can use them to scout the scene and find the players that better fit what your team needs. Specifically, we will use: 3 economy dimensions: performance for each player and each type of round is measured for three types of rounds: fulls buys, antiecos, and half-buys. 2 situational dimensions: pistol rounds and spotlight rounds.

Measuring player performance with statistics has become an everyday practice, yet it has never been questioned more than now. Discussions about sample size and the impact of the reduced number of rounds played have raised concern about the numbers we use to compare players, pick MVPs, and crown the best players in the year. HLTV Rating 2.0 has been the gold standard since its introduction in June 2017, but the transition to CS2 has exposed the need for change.