Who is CS:GO’s greatest-ever player?

As the book closes on the Global Offensive chapter, we reflect on the greatest players the game had to offer.

Greatness is not always easy to define. Everyone has their own criteria, their own eye test, and their unique recollection of events from years gone by. This article will attempt to cut through that and crown an objective GOAT of CS:GO.

Step one of that is our own set of criteria, one that is modeled on our end-of-year Top 20 Players of the Year rankings:

Peak: How high did a player peak? How often were they the best player in their team and the world? How long was their peak?

Longevity: For how long were they among the very best players in the world? How many years did they end in the Top 20 POTY? Did their greatness span across eras?

Team accomplishments: How much did the player win and how much did they contribute to their trophy wins with MVPs?

Using this, we have whittled it down to a ten-man shortlist of these candidates:

These are the players with the right combination of sustained fragging power, MVPs, Big Event trophies, and Top 20 POTY appearances to crack the list. Players that just missed out include Robin "⁠flusha⁠" Rönnquist, Janusz "⁠Snax⁠" Pogorzelski, Freddy "⁠KRIMZ⁠" Johansson, Richard "⁠shox⁠" Papillon, and five-time Major champion Peter "⁠dupreeh⁠" Rasmussen, but ultimately the players in the final ten outplaced them in a number of categories.

We have also made this a list about individual ability, meaning there are no in-game leaders in this article. Ultimately, that is not a conversation that can be decided objectively. Many details are only available to teammates and coaches and, even then, are unquantifiable. Therefore, this article will focus on star players.

Where else to start other than MVPs? These are the HLTV awards that are handed out at notable events to the best performer of a given tournament. We take into account the usual metrics, with a weight towards performances in the biggest matches at the business end of the playoffs. We can see the true cream of the crop in this leaderboard over Global Offensive's lifespan.

s1mple is top with 21 MVPs, but device is just behind him with 19 and the two are tied on 13 MVPs at Big Events. ZywOo has made a late break into third with 16 (9 at Big Events or Majors) before the list tails off at 10 or fewer MVPs.

device and coldzera are the only players with two Major MVPs, the ultimate individual prize in Counter-Strike, but with this list a big three starts to emerge: s1mple, device, and ZywOo; players who have been excellent deep enough into tournaments to pick up the lion’s share of MVP awards.

ZywOo does fall off once we consider longevity, though it is hardly his fault: Two of his peak years were online and he has only been a top-tier player since 2019. In his four active years, he has never placed below the top two in our Top 20 POTY — and has remained on that course in 2023.

s1mple, over a larger sample of seven appearances, has a median placement of second, and is the only player (thus far) to place first on three occasions. device’s longevity is even better with eight appearances, but he does suffer from a lack of a single first-place finish. His peak came in the same era as s1mple, and more often than not he could not match the individual form of the Ukrainian.

NiKo enters the conversation here with seven Top 20 POTY placements and a solid median of fourth place. But, like device, the lack of a number one placement hurts his GOAT argument. Can you be the game’s greatest ever player when you were never a single year’s one?

A counter-argument to this is that not all years are made equal, and device’s 2018 — in which he accrued 7 MVPs, 10 trophies, and a 1.24 average rating — would have been enough for first place in many other years.

Now, let's tackle the controversial part of any GOAT discussion: How much should team accolades factor into the conversation? device leads our candidates in Big Event wins by a large margin thanks to his time in the legendary Astralis side of 2018-20, but how relevant is this to an individual award like the GOAT debate?

In the early years of CS:GO, it was harder for an event to qualify for ‘Big Event’ status; teams did not follow each other around the circuit as events ran concurrently and big teams chose to skip different ones. We see this with f0rest and GeT_RiGhT’s 23 LAN victories and olofmeister’s 25, one more than device's 24.

This adds another spanner in the works, of how we evaluate performance across such disparate eras.

There were no Majors until Winter 2013, part of why Ninjas in Pyjamas' two-year stint as the best team in the world only left them with one crown. kennyS was harshly barred from the DreamHack Winter 2014 Major after Hovik "⁠KQLY⁠" Tovmassian’s VAC ban, and only played at two Big Events in his peak year of 2014. In 2015 and 2016, on the flip side, there were two Majors in the first half of the year and fnatic and SK took full advantage.

Greatness is a big factor behind team success, but so is timing. device won 10 LANs in 2018, but he attended eighteen, far more than the amount attended by big teams in the years after COVID. This means that team success needs to be taken with a pinch of salt even when we are comparing the players that contributed most to that team success.

Still, device has a healthy lead here, and is close enough in MVPs to s1mple to remain firmly in the conversation. As the best player in the greatest team of all time, he is uniquely placed to challenge s1mple; he has four times the Majors, and nearly double his LAN titles. If we consider greatness as synonymous with trophies, s1mple has a real contender.

But team success is finicky. When we look at team success through the lens of how often our player was the MVP, the main driving force behind these trophies, a clear image emerges: s1mple has been MVP of all 11 of his Big Event wins, and ZywOo at all seven of his. This supernatural duo has picked up many a losing MVP, and they are their team’s best player event after event.

device, coldzera, and NiKo sit at the still impressive 50-60% mark, but that gap to 100% is a telling one. s1mple and ZywOo are never carried to team success. So, even here, an area s1mple and ZywOo might be lacking in by raw titles, we can see just how impactful they have been even when compared to the very best.

This is only exacerbated when we start looking purely at individual form. It is hard to compare across eras again; ranking filters only came into being in 2015, and Rating 2.0 in 2016, so we will resort to the Old Faithful of metrics: Kills. It is an easy stat to inflate at times, but over this large of a sample size and in such an impressive cohort it is an efficient one to measure pure output.

The table shows the players' absolute peak, the spell of 50 Big Event maps where they had the most kills per 30 rounds. f0rest and GeT_RiGhT get up to second and fourth; both averaged more than 26.0 Kp30 in Ninjas in Pyjamas’s first 50 Big Event maps of Global Offensive.

But s1mple’s advantage here is a damning one. Not only did he average 28.0 in 2018, but he also eclipsed any other player’s peak when he hit a 27.9 average in 2021 as Natus Vincere won the Intel Grand Slam and PGL Major Stockholm.

When we look by year once again, we can see just how glaring s1mple’s advantage is. Of the ten highest years by Kp30 out of our candidates, s1mple has six of them. He has sustained a superhuman level of output over a longer period than many players’ careers.

We can see how short most careers are, even on this illustrious shortlist. coldzera, olofmeister, and GeT_RiGhT are all #1 players but won a huge majority of their MVPs and trophies in a two-year period. s1mple and device’s longevity is far beyond even the other all-time greats.

Not all games, or years, are made equal. So let's stress test s1mple once again in the hottest of all of Global Offensive's cauldrons: Major playoffs.

At first glance, this table might change things. ZywOo is far away in the lead, at a 1.30 rating. NiKo, even, is above s1mple and device.

But keep a keen eye on sample size: s1mple has played in four times as many Major playoff matches as ZywOo, and twice as many as NiKo. Plenty of s1mple's maps came as heavy underdogs too, in his valiant attempts to take Liquid or a low-firepower Natus Vincere deep into the Majors.

When you consider that most of ZywOo's sample here comes from Paris, against lower-ranked opposition, the picture becomes less clear cut. NiKo, meanwhile, has only gone further than the quarter-finals twice — in Boston and in Stockholm — and could not prevent his side crashing out in groups on eight occasions. Their datasets are apples to s1mple's orange.

ZywOo was an early bloomer, a player that hit the ground running at tier one à la Michael Owen or Kylian Mbappé in football. But CS2 has arrived too early — and there have been too few Major playoff runs — for him to truly challenge s1mple for the title of GOAT, even if he, as expected, clinches #1 in 2023. Covid is to blame for some of that, but ZywOo still had opportunities to go further in Berlin, Antwerp, and Rio.

Five years of supernatural form are a fantastic start, and ZywOo has s1mple close in his sights. But s1mple has been at that level since 2016, a three-year headstart that makes all the difference. device is the only player to hold a candle to the Ukrainian longevity-wise, but his individual form cannot match the alien form of s1mple and ZywOo.

s1mple has his Major, and, albeit partly online, an Intel Grand Slam. He has the most MVPs, the most #1 placements in our Top 20 Players of the Year awards, and the joint-highest Big Event Rating 1.0. Even ZywOo struggles to hold a candle to his fragging (if not Rating) peaks, ones that s1mple has sustained at a higher level and over a longer period than any other player.

He is the perfect combination of dedication and talent. His 23,476 hours of gameplay in CS:GO, an average of nearly six hours per day since the game’s release, has helped extract the very best out of an already mind-boggling toolkit. s1mple is, nearly without question, the greatest Counter-Strike: Global Offensive player of all time.