HLTV Confirmed guest profile: smooya

Owen "⁠smooya⁠" Butterfield will be the special guest on the 15th episode of HLTV Confirmed, which airs Wednesday 12 at 20:00 . Ahead of the show, we examined the 19-year-old’s career as well as his controversial mannerisms.

The British AWP'er has become a mainstay of bigger events this year after being picked up by BIG, the German team making waves by reaching the final on home soil at ESL One Cologne and reaching the quarter-final at the FACEIT Major in September.

During the year, smooya has repeatedly shown his ability to divide the community with his behaviour, many fans and pros loving him for his brazen openness, and just as many disliking him for being 'toxic'. An example of this occurred at the StarSeries Season 6 Finals in October, where several MOUZ players—as well as fans—commented negatively on his loudmouthed style and handling of an auto-sniper misbuy in their elimination matchup.

smooya got his first chance to prove himself on LAN at the iBP Master in November 2016, as Denis "⁠electroNic⁠" Sharipov was unable to attend the event with FlipSid3, who, at the time, fielded legends of the game such as Yegor "⁠markeloff⁠" Markelov and Andrey "⁠B1ad3⁠" Gorodenskiy. B1ad3 revealed at the event that they had picked up the young Brit because he "knew him from Rank S", and that the youngster had 'a lot of potential'.

In June of last year, smooya was picked up by Epsilon, but would only play in the European mixture for three months before being benched to make way for an all-Swedish roster. He would later tell HLTV.org that he was taking a break from the game, since a $100,000 buyout clause meant no teams would take him on, noting that he didn't "expect anyone to match my buyout clause, I think [Epsilon] are just looking for a little profit."

In January 2018, Epsilon parted ways with their Swedish roster, which meant the comeback of smooya, as he hand-picked a team of European players with the intent of being "top 30/35 within 6 months..." This wouldn't happen, though, as the Brit was picked up by BIG in April, after the organisation had failed to locate any German AWP player that could satisfy their needs. smooya commented on his new chance saying that he had "looked up to some of these players for years”, and that the goal was to reach Major legends status with them, which they achieved by reaching the quarter-finals in London.

The 15th episode of HLTV Confirmed, featuring smooya, airs tomorrow at 20:00 and can be watched on our twitch channel or in the player below: