HLTV Award Show 2023 panel: Who voted and how it works

We explain the changes to last year's process, and list all 35 members of our expert panel.

It's award show season again. On December 27, the top 20 players of the year begins, and on January 13 the countdown will culminate at the HLTV x 1xBet Award Show in Belgrade, Serbia.

As well as revealing the three highest-ranked players in the top 20, the Award Show will also feature community awards, HLTV awards, and the subject of this article: Panel Awards.

For this, we have assembled 10 on-air talent members, five of HLTV's newsroom, and 20 representatives from the best teams of 2023. The panel of 35 then voted on seven categories:

We will then collect together the five role-based player awards to create an all-star lineup like we have done for Big Events throughout 2023. If a player wins two awards, an extra one is drafted in to be the 'fill' fifth.

The voting process is the same as last year. The panel was presented with a shortlist of ten candidates prepared by HLTV for each category, and asked to vote for their top three. There were five points for first place, three for second, and one for third.

These are then totaled to reveal the official nominees; the three people with the highest points in each category.

What do the categories represent?

The majority of the panel award's voting is done to create an individualistic team of the year. We have the obvious roles to get started in the form of an in-game leader, coach, and AWPer.

The first two awards are a big part of why we use a panel in the first place. For high-fragging players, we could use our top 20 players list and methodology to crown a king in each role.

But, for in-game leader and coach, these decisions are ultimately subjective. For that, we needed experts, people whose job it is to analyze the game and have the most informed subjective opinions possible. By this method, all of the intangibles that make for great leaders can be taken into account.

The same theory is true for highlight of the year, which was part of the HLTV awards last year but has been moved to the Panel this time around.

AWPers are defined as players who ended the year on more than 0.20 sniper kills per round. This is lower than last year's 0.30, a future-proofing method with the impact of CS2 in mind.

Hybrid AWPers like s1mple and ZywOo still qualify for the AWP of the year

Now, we come on to the tricky rifler section. There are not clear, universally agreed-upon, divisions here. Rifling is a spectrum, whether that is from aggressive to passive, sacrificial to baity, or lone wolves to soliders in the pack. There are countless ways to divide up this category, and we considered most.

But, ultimately, the one we settled on was a fifty-fifty split for T side, and to use positions in passive defaults as the key deciding metric. Every player under this methodology is either an Opener, or a Closer. The Openers are players who take an active part in taking map control and pack rifling in defaults. The Closers are the flankers, asked to operate on their own in a classic 3-1-1 default.

Not every map works like this, of course. On Inferno, is the Banana player a Closer or an Opener? On A hits and mid-control, they look like lurkers a lot of the time. But when teams are taking Banana control with three players, it's the Boiler player that is half-lurking.

Last year, we said that Boiler was an Opener position, and Banana a Closer. Then, players with three or more 'Opener' positions were Openers and vice versa.

This year we are adopting a more nuanced approach. Positions, rather than a binary Opener-Closer divide, are given points on a scale from 0-10. Obvious Opener roles like the roaming in-game leader positions are given a 10, and clear lurker hotspots are given 0. The spots in between those extremes then scale between them.

At the end, each player has an average. Some players are obvious — Closer Robin "⁠ropz⁠" Kool has 0.43 points, and Opener Shahar "⁠flameZ⁠" Shushan has 8.83. But, for the players in the middle, between 4 and 6 points, some manual adjudication has been done to sort players neatly into categories that make sense and put two riflers from each long-term lineup into each.

A weakness of this process is that it does not account for flexible half-lurkers, the '4th men' like Emil "⁠Magisk⁠" Reif and Russel "⁠Twistzz⁠" Van Dulken who are neither true closers nor true openers. For our purposes they are considered closers, spending a lot of their time in passive defaults outside of the pack, but it is something worth noting.

Players have to be full-time anchors to qualify for our final award

The fifth and final player role award is the Anchor, designed to reward players with difficult low-action roles on CT side. The support player is a common concept in Counter-Strike, but one that is incredibly hard to define on T side.

Some teams use support players as bomb-site entries, others as utility men, and others as hard lurkers who are restricted in terms of the plays they can make. Often, they do all three in the same round. Yet, on CT side, it is easier to spot which player has the short straw.

Like T side, we have awarded points to each CT position on a scale from 0 (a full anchor, like B on Mirage) to 10 (a full star role, like Connector on Mirage). Players that have an average below three then qualify for the award, a strict line intended to uphold the spirit of the prize and exclude 'star' anchors like ropz, Kaike "⁠KSCERATO⁠" Cerato, and Sergey "⁠Ax1Le⁠" Rykhtorov who anchor on some maps but rotate on others.

When players change their positions (or team) throughout the year, their role can sometimes change. This is another situation where manual intervention is sometimes required, but for this year none of the candidates underwent too drastic a shift.

When we put this all together, we should have a lineup that makes sense. It is built upon the assumption of a sacrificial pack rifling in-game leader that most of the top twenty use, meaning that AWPing in-game leaders can upset the system, but as a general rule, we end up with a team that matches the structure of real lineups: A map control star, a lurking star, an AWPer, in-game leader, and a support.

HLTV Award Show Panel 2023

Finally, here is the panel in full. How they voted will remain confidential so people can vote with their true opinion and protect relationships.

Players represent the teams with which they earned the most ranking points, so Alejandro "⁠alex⁠" Masanet is representing Movistar Riders and Andrey "⁠Jerry⁠" Mekhryakov FORZE rather than their new squads.

Team representatives

Alejandro "⁠alex⁠" Masanet (Movistar Riders)
Dan "⁠apEX⁠" Madesclaire (Vitality)
Ashley "⁠ash⁠" Battye (GamerLegion)
Andrey "⁠B1ad3⁠" Gorodenskiy (Natus Vincere)
Benjamin "⁠blameF⁠" Bremer (Astralis)
Casper "⁠cadiaN⁠" Møller (HEROIC)
Dastan "⁠dastan⁠" Akbayev (Virtus.pro)
Jonathan "⁠EliGE⁠" Jablonowski (Complexity)
Abay "⁠HObbit⁠" Khassenov (Cloud9)
Rasmus "⁠HooXi⁠" Nielsen (G2)
Andrey "⁠Jerry⁠" Mekhryakov (FORZE)
Karim "⁠Krimbo⁠" Moussa (BIG)
Joakim "⁠jkaem⁠" Myrbostad (Apeks)
William "⁠mezii⁠" Merriman (fnatic)
Fredrik "⁠REZ⁠" Sterner (Ninjas in Pyjamas)
Robin "⁠ropz⁠" Kool (FaZe)
Viktor "⁠sdy⁠" Orudzhev (Monte)
Marco "⁠Snappi⁠" Pfeiffer (ENCE)
Dennis "⁠sycrone⁠" Nielsen (MOUZ)
Mareks "⁠YEKINDAR⁠" Gaļinskis (Liquid)

On-air Talent

Sudhen "⁠Bleh⁠" Wahengbam
Lucas "⁠Bubzkji⁠" Andersen
Aleksandar "⁠kassad⁠" Trifunović
Mohan "⁠launders⁠" Govindasamy
Mathieu "⁠Maniac⁠" Quiquerez
Alex "⁠Mauisnake⁠" Ellenberg
Jason "⁠moses⁠" O'Toole
Jacob "⁠Pimp⁠" Winneche
Chad "⁠SPUNJ⁠" Burchill
Janko "⁠YNk⁠" Paunović

HLTV staff

Milan "⁠Striker⁠" Švejda
Lucas "LucasAM" Aznar Miles
Danish "Nohte" Allana
Luís "⁠MIRAA⁠" Mira
Harry "NER0" Richards

Read more

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