Who are the modern day big game Counter-Strike players?

Who performed best — and worst — in arena matches since the online era?

Nearly every Counter-Strike career begins in a comfortable environment, such as a bedroom or a LAN cafe. If a game goes badly you will never meet your teammates again and come the next morning all will be forgotten.

This all changes once you join a team and the pressure starts to ramp up. There are now people to let down, people whose opinion matters to you. If you get to LAN it increases again, with your teammates in the same room as you.

On stage, this is taken to the Nth degree. When you play an online game you are aware that people are watching at home, but it is disconnected. The number of viewers is just a number. When you walk into one of the game's biggest arenas, however, that changes.

If you peek above your monitor you can see just how many people are watching you. Lights are flashing. There might be smoke, or fire. All of a sudden the scale of your task becomes clear, there is nowhere to hide.

For some players this pressure can be back breaking. For others it can light a spark. These are the players that see stage matches not as unwelcome attention, but as a chance to write their legacy. It is this mentality, in part, that sets a great player out from a good one.

This ability to rise to the occasion is something that is not always easy to quantify. Even in arenas, pressure levels are not even. A grand final against FaZe at the LANXESS is different to a quarter-final against a group stage underdog on a Thursday afternoon with a half-empty crowd. Then there are events like the RMR, where the pressure is tangible even with no spectators at all.

But as a general rule it is under the lights in the arena that these big game players shine, so we thought it was time to quantify this 'clutch' ability — to demystify the narratives and see the forest from the trees. Using a sample of the 12 arena events we have had since the online era, we have built up a decent enough size. It's time to take stock and find out who are modern CS:GO's big game players.

Events considered

When we look at unfiltered rating there are few surprises in who comes out on top. It does not take a rocket scientist to know that Oleksandr "⁠s1mple⁠" Kostyliev, Mathieu "⁠ZywOo⁠" Herbaut, and Dmitry "⁠sh1ro⁠" Sokolov are the three best players in the world.

Beyond the big three, however, we start to see points of interest. Justin "⁠jks⁠" Savage has won all three arena events he has attended since the pandemic, and his 1.18 rating on stage is surely a part of the reason why (as well as being slightly inflated by that fact).

Nemanja "⁠huNter-⁠" Kovač, Helvijs "⁠broky⁠" Saukants, and Denis "⁠electroNic⁠" Sharipov fill out the top seven, all players who are backing up their reputations for big game play. They are joined in the top ten by Robin "⁠ropz⁠" Kool, Antwerp MVP Håvard "⁠rain⁠" Nygaard, and, slightly lower than we might expect, Nikola "⁠NiKo⁠" Kovač.

With the exception of sh1ro, and perhaps ZywOo and broky, these are all stalwarts of the scene, experienced heads who were more than used to arena play before the COVID pandemic. The clutch of riflers below the big three are the most interesting, a group of players who are good in groups but always seem to come away as the player of the match in a few playoff series.

Let's now look at the same data from a different angle, by comparing a player's arena rating to their rating in the group stages of the same twelve events.

jks impresses once again, though it is important to remember his abnormally high map win percentage in this sample. rain is next, his average of 1.15 in playoffs is 0.08 above his 1.07 group stage figure. ropz and broky are also present, which is no surprise given FaZe's wealth of post-COVID titles and their reputation for clutch play under pressure.

What might be more interesting here is to look at the players that do not improve. The median delta is about -0.04 — the score of René "⁠TeSeS⁠" Madsen, sh1ro, and ZywOo — meaning that it is normal for players to not quite hit their group stage averages in the arena.

It is not just pressure that causes this drop-off. You are more likely to face harder opposition in playoffs, meaning closer games and lower ratings; there is always more than one factor at play. This type of comparison also punishes players with higher group stage ratings more than those who are more average because they have more to lose. A 0.04 drop-off for ZywOo and sh1ro is not too significant for that very reason.

The stats might become more significant when we move further down the list into the negatives. The bottom five players on this ranking include four of the very best players in the world: Sergey "⁠Ax1Le⁠" Rykhtorov, Ilya "⁠m0NESY⁠" Osipov, Martin "⁠stavn⁠" Lund and NiKo. All of them lose at least 0.09 rating points in the arena compared to in groups, dropping from around the 1.20 mark to 1.10.

Ax1Le is conspicuous here, a player we praised for a 1.26 rating in 'big matches' in 2022. Two things might explain this difference: One, the top 20 definition of 'big matches' is more lenient, defined as any match between teams in the second half of a big event. This includes the group stage winners' match in ESL's 6-team playoff format, as well as non-arena big events like ESL Pro League. The second is that Ax1Le's 2022 was inflated by his MVP performance at IEM Dallas, where he recorded a 1.33 rating in playoffs.

To date, that is the only time Ax1Le averaged a rating above 1.00 in the arena section of an event. In his last two arena events, he averaged a 0.92 rating in Rio in 2023, and 0.96 in the same stadium for the Rio Major in 2022. Add to that 0.99 ratings in Katowice in 2022 and 0.88 in Stockholm in 2021 and we start to see a picture emerge of a player that is not always at 100% under the lights.

stavn is also a concerning presence here, with a -0.11 drop off in the arena under a whopping sample size of 39 thirties (1166 rounds). It is simply over too many matches to not be a point of criticism, even if a 1.07 playoff rating is respectable in a vacuum.

NiKo is notable too, but perhaps more because he farms group stages so well with a 1.25 average rating than because a 1.15 arena rating is 'bad.' He is still good in arena matches, he is just not always the superstar he can be in groups. This explains why it is huNter- and m0NESY who came away from G2's back-to-back event wins with the MVPs despite NiKo being a better player on paper.

But we do need to take a step back here. These stats are interesting, especially for star players like stavn, Ax1Le, and NiKo, who have teammates above them, but they are not career-defining. We have only included 32 players here that played more than 450 rounds, but that is still only 15 full 30-round matches. That's less than two full events, so we are still working from a very limited sample size.

It is enough to identify trends, but not to write any player off. In the case of jks, who only just had enough sample size to be featured with 16 thirties, it is clear that the +0.12 difference in the arena is just as much to do with him winning all three events as it is to do with his experience and ability to withstand pressure. This is not to discredit the Australian, it is just to say that it is hard to attribute all of this +0.12 difference entirely to his individual level without a larger sample size.

An interesting case study in this regard is the career of s1mple, who has demonstrated a fairly even level of performance since 2017. By looking at his big game history we can see just how much team success is tied to rating in big games.

At first s1mple hovered above a 1.00 rating before coming into his own at Natus Vincere in 2017. There were struggles when he dropped to around a 1.15 rating in big games in the Danylo "⁠Zeus⁠" Teslenko-Ioann "⁠Edward⁠" Sukhariev era of NAVI, but once 2021 rolled around his rating skyrocketed along with the team's fortunes.

This is difficult to circumvent. You can argue that Natus Vincere's success came precisely because s1mple hit that astronomical peak in 2021, but it seems more probable from an eye test that he was only a slightly better and more experienced player just in a far better team. When you are winning games, your rating will inflate. Scoring 20 goals for Manchester City is probably less impressive than scoring 15 for Brentford.

The same applies in CS; the average rating in won rounds from the top 20 players of 2022 was 2.16, while that number drops to 0.95 in lost rounds. Winning more rounds thanks to being in a better team is always going to give your stats a bump. This is true of rating in all cases — it is part of why all five Astralis players ended 2018 above a 1.10 rating — but its effect is exaggerated when we look at smaller sample sizes like arena games.

De-coupling individual form from that of a player's team is very difficult. ZywOo has been criticised for his performances in elimination matches before, but he has only been outside of the top two performers in his team once since IEM Katowice 2022. It is true that he has underperformed there, but they have been team collapses more often than ZywOo letting the side down.

Like most of these articles, we are left asking you to take these numbers with a pinch of salt. This article does not mean that jks is the best player in the world, or that NiKo and stavn are the worst. This data shows a real trend, but it is not an irreversible one, nor does it define a player's arena play. Going into the Major, there are all sorts of possibilities.

Can those at the bottom overcome their supposed demons and disprove this list? Will those at the top stumble as their sample size increases or will they continue to bed in their impeccable record? Their CS:GO legacies might depend upon it.