Best Five: IEM Cologne 2023

Nikola "⁠NiKo⁠" Kovač and Ilya "⁠m0NESY⁠" Osipov headline our role-based team of the event.

G2's win at IEM Cologne was fuelled by the same force as their wins in Katowice and Abu Dhabi: Firepower. NiKo and m0NESY ended the event as the two highest-rated players, with Nemanja "⁠huNter-⁠" Kovač in sixth as the second-highest rifler. It is a trident of deadly potential, even if it may have been a blunt one on occasion in the past few months, and everybody was reminded of that fact over this last week.

All three make it into our Best Five of the event, awards based on the in-game roles of each player. The aim of the process is to find the best Opener, Closer, Anchor, In-Game Leader (IGL), and AWPer of the event — thus sharing out individual recognition beyond the AWP-heavy MVP lists.

Without further ado then, here is HLTV's Best Five of IEM Cologne 2023.

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The Anchor category was the one with the least obvious choice at Cologne given solid performances from Justin "⁠jks⁠" Savage, Rasmus "⁠sjuush⁠" Beck, Valeriy "⁠b1t⁠" Vakhovskiy, and Ilya "⁠Perfecto⁠" Zalutskiy to name a few.

Ultimately, none of those players matched the peaks of Shahar "⁠flameZ⁠" Shushan, who is a new entry into the category after taking most of Peter "⁠dupreeh⁠" Rasmussen's anchor positions in Vitality.

He was Vitality's highest-rated player on four occassions in Cologne, and is excelling as the side's entry fragger with 27% of his deaths getting traded.

The move was made for firepower reasons, so it should not be a surprise that flameZ excels in the usual metrics compared to other anchors: 76 ADR, a multi-kill in 19% of rounds, and a 1.13 rating are excellent compared to his peers.

He will need time to get truly comfortable in his new CT spots, and it is sometimes difficult for him to turn off his inner aggression from spots that rarely need it. But all in all, flameZ impressed enough to secure a spot here.

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BLAST Premier Fall Groups 2023 was m0NESY's worst LAN for G2. Naturally, he followed it up with one of his best.

Only barely missing out on the MVP, m0NESY displayed some outrageous peaks in Cologne. He was his side's best player on Ancient and Mirage in the grand final, as well as against Vitality on Mirage and FaZe on Ancient. He finished all of those maps above a 1.60 rating, putting G2 on his back when it mattered most.

m0NESY, still just 18, is not the model of consistency quite yet. Even in an event as good as this a few bad maps (for his standards) are sprinkled in. But his peaks are unlike anything most players can reach, and that means his averages are still godly.

He scored a multi-kill in 24% of rounds, and averaged 25.2 kills per 30 rounds. His radar tells the story: even among seriously strong competition in the AWPer category, m0NESY clears them.

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huNter- acted as the third piece of G2 during Cologne, not quite hitting his MVP form of IEM Katowice, but stepping up when others were quiet as he always does.

It was an event that cemented his reputation as a big game player too, smashing Astralis in semi-finals and having two strong maps in the final.

Struggles in the last two maps of the final and a lower ceiling than NiKo and m0NESY put him out of the MVP race, but within his role there was no contest. No other lurker can match huNter-'s 80 ADR and 78% KAST with as deep of a run.

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Note: The IGL category is about team success rather than individual, and thus is more subjective than the other four roles. Individual play is rewarded by them being entered into the other four categories as players. Benjamin "⁠blameF⁠" Bremer, for example, was eligible as both an Opener and as an IGL.

Marco "⁠Snappi⁠" Pfeiffer's ENCE are no longer underdogs. They were able to come through the summer window with their stars intact, and have now followed up their IEM Dallas success with a grand final run at the second biggest event of the year.

IGL Snappi, despite the level of Álvaro "⁠SunPayus⁠" García and Guy "⁠NertZ⁠" Iluz, might be ENCE's biggest asset. His partnership with Eetu "⁠sAw⁠" Saha has created one of the best systems in the world, and that was a key factor in getting ENCE past both Vitality and HEROIC this event.

Before the grand final, ENCE had the highest T side win percentage of the playoff teams at the event (56.3%), putting their "chaotic" style to good use.

Failure in the final is a stick we could use to beat Snappi with, and the IGL category is nearly always the most difficult to establish impact from. Rasmus "⁠HooXi⁠" Nielsen could not have done much more this event, and with his individuals in such fine form he rarely had to reach into the absolute depths of G2's playbook.

In Snappi's case, the impact is more obvious. ENCE have strong individuals, SunPayus especially, but leading ENCE into the grand final is an achievement Snappi deserves heaps of credit for.

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NiKo finally has another LAN MVP, 1373 days since his last at BLAST Pro Series Copenhagen in 2019. He has come close, at the Stockholm Major and in G2's two trophy successes, but he showed a level of consistency in Cologne that could not be ignored.

His lowest map rating was a 1.11, making his event page a sea of green. Somehow, whilst going for 32.6% (the highest at the event) of G2's T side opening kill attempts, NiKo ended the event with a 44% survival rate, second only to m0NESY. He had the aggression of Mareks "⁠YEKINDAR⁠" Gaļinskis but with the death rate of Dzhami "⁠Jame⁠" Ali.

"On some maps I'm not in the position to shine, on some maps I have to sacrifice more, on some maps the team are playing more around me," NiKo told us in his MVP interview. "I think I am very calm right now and that’s probably why I have maybe fewer deaths. I don’t try to force things, I am just taking it a bit more passive. If I got two or three kills I would go for four, but now I rather maybe sit back, chill a bit, and breathe."

Placing more value on his life has resulted in one of the best events of his career, able to shine in a role that he has defined and, in his words, "mastered."

Read more

NiKo: "I feel like the most complete player in my career in this moment"

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The players unlucky to miss out include Nicolai "⁠device⁠" Reedtz, Mathieu "⁠ZywOo⁠" Herbaut, and SunPayus, who all put the Big Green to good use in Germany. blameF and HooXi deserve credit as IGLs whose teams exceeded expectations, and jks was as stable a fourth piece for G2 as always.

In the end, these were the five players we settled on. It is an aggressive quartet of riflers, but there would not be too many shuffles compared to their current positions — which is, of course, the whole point.