Is the entry fragging role dead?

We take a look at just how much the role of aggressive riflers has changed.

When you think of entry fraggers, who comes to mind first? Older fans of the game might think of Adam "⁠friberg⁠" Friberg charging up Banana, Peter "⁠dupreeh⁠" Rasmussen jumping through Jungle smokes, or Dan "⁠apEX⁠" Madesclaire leading Vincent "⁠Happy⁠" Schopenhauer's 4-man deathball up A Long on Dust2.

For more recent fans, the question is harder. Rounds, nearly all of the time, begin with some sort of default. In those defaults, the entry fragger is inherently less of a bulldozer, and thus is harder to pin down than in an era of frequent executes.

There are space creators, in the ilk of Mareks "⁠YEKINDAR⁠" Gaļinskis or Andrei "⁠arT⁠" Piovezan, with more of a priority on opening picks and map control than busting a site wide open. There are lone wolves, heirs of 2015 Olof "⁠olofmeister⁠" Kajbjer like Nikola "⁠NiKo⁠" Kovač or Sergey "⁠Ax1Le⁠" Rykhtorov who hunt for openings away from or ahead of the pack. But it is rarer to find a player that is consistently first into bombsites, a team's nominated lamb to throw into the slaughter.

Aggression is as much a part of the game now as then, but the consequence of defaults is that roles are less defined. If you are executing out of B on Mirage, but your best entry fragger is in top mid, it makes little sense to wait for him to come all the way through T-Spawn so that he can entry. Instead, your B lurker might have to take up the mantle. If it was an A execute, it might be the A defaulter.

These openers, or space creators, can just as easily end up lurkers as entry fraggers. Think of Kristian "⁠k0nfig⁠" Wienecke in Red on Ancient, or YEKINDAR or NiKo prowling around the top of Banana. The entry fragger is the player that is there first — it is a role by round, not by map or team. It is easy to identify an entry player by eye, but it is far harder when we use statistics. Opening kill attempts are often used, but the first kill in a round can occur miles away from a bomb site.

Entry fraggers are not the only players who can take part in opening duels.

Because of this, entry fraggers are often conflated with openers, players who look to get their teams into 5v4s and so have a high opening kill attempts percentage. There are, however, players who are clearly lurkers but score highly on this list, Ax1Le and Benjamin "⁠blameF⁠" Bremer being examples. It is not that opening kill statistics are useless; the 75%+ conversion rate of 5v4s tells us that a player who can consistently secure 5v4s is of immense value. It is just that the statistic has little bearing on who is the first man into a bombsite.

To solve this statistical black hole, we have done some manual digging. After looking at every match at BLAST World Final, and recording which player was the true 'entry' of each bombsite hit by eye, here is a scatter plot of a player's opening attempts against their bombsite entry attempts.

Rounds where defaults fell apart are excluded, as are rounds where the 'entry' player is uncertain such as when two players jump through a smoke at the same time. Although 632 of our 814 'valid' rounds came about while the T-Side still had 5 players alive, the results still vary greatly from opening kill stats — it is often the second or third player in who has the space or time to get the kill. That so many of our entry rounds occur with all players alive is also useful in that it does not punish opening duelists as much as you might think. We still see which players predominately use as their entry when they have five alive.

Stats are from every T-Side half at BLAST World Final. For an interactive and fully labelled version of this chart, as well as a bar chart of every player, click here

Matching the eye test and common knowledge, it is no surprise that Finn "⁠karrigan⁠" Andersen, Rasmus "⁠HooXi⁠" Nielsen, and Nick "⁠nitr0⁠" Cannella enter bombsites first far more than they are involved in an opening duel — these are IGLs who allow their star players freedom in defaults, before giving them the luxury of becoming trade fraggers in site hits.

The fourth player in this cluster is Shahar "⁠flameZ⁠" Shushan, who stands out in two ways: He is not an IGL, and his T-Side positions are not as consistently in the pack as those that surround him. He is the B Lurk on Overpass, the A Lurk on Anubis, and the B Lurk on Vertigo, for example. That he manages to record such a high number of opening and entry frag attempts speaks to OG's setup as a whole.

Nemanja "⁠nexa⁠" Isaković is a fragging IGL, and gives himself the roles that enable that description. That then means somebody else has to go in first to enable he and Adam "⁠NEOFRAG⁠" Zouhar to be the trade fraggers. OG also did a solid amount of calling out of spawn at BLAST World Final, leading to early groupings of the whole five-man team which reduces the relevance of flameZ's positions in the default. Still, he is an interesting case in that if OG have a choice, it is usually flameZ that they use as their entry fragger.

Other points of interest come with Outsiders, who do something similar with David "⁠n0rb3r7⁠" Danielyan. He and Aleksei "⁠Qikert⁠" Golubev share most of the entry duties on the team, with Petr "⁠fame⁠" Bolyshev and Evgenii "⁠FL1T⁠" Lebedev clearly set up as star players and closers. Vitality also invert the karrigan-HooXi meta by having IGL apEX as their opener and dupreeh as the most-common entry fragger.

There is also the group of star openers in the bottom-right quadrant, including YEKINDAR, NiKo, and k0nfig. They are extremely aggressive by opening kill attempts and the eye test, often being the key to unlocking a round for their team. They also entry frag quite often, with YEKINDAR nearly always taking the lead in B Hits on Inferno and Mid-to-B splits on Anubis. NiKo has similar tendencies, being the designated entry fragger over HooXi at BLAST on B on Inferno and Secret pushes on Nuke.

YEKINDAR's T-Side heat map from the semi-final against OG, in which he entried up Banana on five occasions.

The question is whether that is enough: Should YEKINDAR and NiKo be called entry fraggers when another player on their team usually goes first? This is obviously a semantic debate, but it is an important one. Other terms can describe this role but with more context: YEKINDAR prefers to call himself a "space creator" and this defines the modern aggressive rifler more accurately than entry fragger.

Going into a bombsite is just one facet of their role. When we watch players like YEKINDAR, we are struck by how they take map control, how they engineer favourable duels with teammate's utility and movement. They are not jumping around corners and crossing their fingers for a teammate to trade.

karrigan and HooXi remain as designated entry fraggers in the strict sense, in a tradition that hails back to Mathias "⁠MSL⁠" Lauridsen running into sites ahead of Philip "⁠aizy⁠" Aistrup, Markus "⁠Kjaerbye⁠" Kjærbye and k0nfig in 2015 and 2016. Yet, they are not who we think of when we hear 'entry fragger.'

Instead, it is the openers and space creators who are defined in this way. And, despite the differences, it makes sense. Their openers may come far from a bomb-site but are just as high-impact — untraded 5v4 advantages still lead to round victories more than three-quarters of the time. Like most things in modern Counter-Strike, it is difficult to sum up a player in one or two words. 'Entry fragger' might be an oversimplification, but it is a label that has stuck in a way 'space creator' has not.

Kylian Mbappe and Cristiano Ronaldo operate more like old-school strikers than wingers, yet they are still referred to as left-wingers. Some circles will call them inverted forwards, but the vast majority will still refer to them as left-wingers — which is absolutely fine. The same is true of entry fraggers. The role has evolved, but not beyond recognition.

Players like YEKINDAR, arT, and Robert "⁠Patsi⁠" Isyanov embody the spirit of the entry fragger of old, the kind of players that would rather barge through a fence than walk around it. Letting somebody else go into a bombsite first does not change that; let them keep their 'entry fragger' title. They have earnt it.