Why sdy has been in the form of his life with Monte

The Ukrainian spent years away from the limelight but is now back to his best.

Not too long ago, the idea of Viktor "⁠sdy⁠" Orudzhev fighting for individual honors and being in the running for a place in a Top 20 Players of the Year ranking would have seemed like a ludicrous scenario for most. After all, he had long fallen into a role-player position, his recent playing tenures all ending without much fanfare.

But everything changed when he was offered the chance to play for Monte. In the space of a year, the team has gone from struggling to enter the top 50 to being within arm's reach of a top 5 place, with sdy at the heart of the action, putting up numbers never seen from him before and picking up an MVP medal.

"I always knew that I could play at this level," he tells HLTV.org.

It would be easy to simply call sdy a late bloomer, but that label doesn’t do justice to the good years that he had at the start of his career with Spirit. He officially joined the team in January 2018, two months after winning his debut FPL season, and emerged as a budding star, averaging a 1.16 rating on LAN between 2018 and 2019.

During those two years, Spirit became a regular presence on the international stage and even reached a number of finals at smaller-scale events. But for one reason or another, they could never find the consistency to establish themselves as a top team.

Over time, sdy began to sit on the periphery of the action to accommodate players like Nikolay "⁠mir⁠" Bityukov and Boris "⁠magixx⁠" Vorobiev, and watched his numbers tank. "I had to fill roles that I didn’t enjoy playing," he recalls."I remember that I was really upset about it."

After PGL Major Stockholm 2021, sdy concluded that he needed a change of scenery and stepped down from the roster. Still, that doesn’t take away from the special bond that he created with Spirit. On his left wrist, he has a tattoo of the organization’s logo, celebrating "one of the most important parts of my life."

sdy decided to test the international waters and joined MAD Lions. But that coincided with the start of the war in Ukraine, forcing him to flee his home in Kyiv and seek refuge in the northwest city of Kostopil.

It was, sdy recalls, "a very dark period" in his life. The turmoil was never far from his mind, and he couldn’t even find an escape from the war in the game. Unable to practice or play for a few weeks, he watched from the sidelines as the team failed to qualify for the European RMRs leading to PGL Major Antwerp. "It was a hard blow for me," he says. But it wouldn’t be the only one: in April, MAD Lions shut down their Counter-Strike section and put the entire squad up for transfer.

sdy says that he used this time to improve himself, physically and mentally. A few months later, he was rewarded with the chance to play for NAVI, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for any Ukrainian player. It was an incredible source of pride for everyone in his family, especially his father, who had introduced him to Counter-Strike when he was three years old, later taking him to his first LAN, a local pre-qualifier for World Cyber Games 2005.

sdy was under no illusions when he joined NAVI. Going in, he knew that he was going to be just a filler while the team weighed up its options after the removal of Kirill "⁠Boombl4⁠" Mikhailov. A permanent position would be tough to come by, but he took the offer anyway. "I understood that I had to make the most of it", he says.

It would have been hard to imagine a better way to start his NAVI stint than by winning the BLAST Premier Spring Final, in Lisbon, where he proudly draped the Ukrainian flag over his shoulders in the arena. "It felt like I had a mission to represent my country and to make it proud," he recalls. "I needed to show the world that Ukraine needs support, that people are suffering. It was a very big chance for us. I was just playing Counter-Strike, but in the back of my mind, I was still thinking about it [the war]. It never leaves you. It’s always there."

Natus Vincere went on to finish in second place at IEM Cologne, but the rest of the season was utterly forgettable. As the season wore on, the team also began to look more disjointed and demoralized, and Oleksandr "⁠s1mple⁠" Kostyliev’s frustration with his teammates, especially sdy, became a regular talking point during events. But did sdy ever feel singled out? "It’s just the way he sometimes acts," he says. "And it was not towards me or any other player in particular. I remember that he was trying to work on himself. He was trying to be a leader on the team. When he and I were talking, he was very friendly and supportive."

At the end of the season, sdy found himself looking for a new team, having been replaced by Andrii "⁠npl⁠" Kukharskyi. While disappointed that things didn’t go his way, he focused on the positive and took it as a lesson. In his opinion, the role distribution was dysfunctional, and the team couldn’t work through its issues. "We didn’t talk openly about things too much," he explains. "We lacked synergy and we didn’t understand each other as players."

sdy didn’t have to wait long to find a new home. Three weeks into 2023, he joined Monte, then ranked 48th in the world, together with compatriot and head coach Sergey "⁠lmbt⁠" Bezhanov. He saw potential in the team, which ticked two important boxes: It was an international roster, which would make it easier to replace players if necessary, but at the same time, it had a Ukrainian core, giving him the chance to continue to represent his country in tournaments.

For a team like that, with no spot in either BLAST Premier or ESL Pro Tour, to climb up the ranks, the only option is to grind. And that is what they did. In 2023, no team in the scene played more maps than Monte’s 353. (By contrast, Vitality and G2, the two best teams of 2023, played a combined 283 maps.)

Monte entered the BLAST Paris Major ranked 22nd in the world. They punched above their weight in the French capital, beating FURIA (No.8), fnatic (No.15), and Natus Vincere (No.3) in the Legends Stage to ensure a top-eight finish before a quarter-final loss to eventual runners-up GamerLegion. It was the biggest achievement in the short history of Monte, an organization launched just a year earlier.

"People were underestimating us," sdy says. "And we didn’t know if we would play as well on LAN as we did online. That was the part we were a bit scared about. Well, probably not the other guys, but myself. I think the biggest factor was that we didn’t take the tournament for granted.

"We had an advantage over teams that had pressure. We didn’t have pressure. We were talking, being good friends and just enjoying the game. We supported each other, without anyone putting pressure on anyone."

A worrier by nature, sdy had concerns that all the team’s gains would be undone when Falcons came knocking for Mohammad "⁠BOROS⁠" Malhas, who, in sdy’s own words, has the potential to be "one of the best players" in the world. The team eventually decided to gamble on Alexander "⁠br0⁠" Bro, an unproven player with only minor LAN appearances on record at the time. "When we played our first scrims with him at a bootcamp, we realized that we could make it work pretty easily," sdy notes.

The new roster’s potential could be seen in ESL Pro League Season 18, where Monte reached the semi-finals, beating teams like HEROIC, MIBR, and Vitality along the way. After a quiet showing in their first CS2 tournaments, Monte hit a run of form that saw them crowned champions of ESL Challenger Jönköping, where they notably beat Virtus.pro and Eternal Fire. There were also semi-final runs at ESL Challenger Atlanta and the Thunderpick World Championship, as well as a second-place finish in the Roobet Cup.

In BOROS’ absence, other players have stepped up to the plate, including sdy himself. He averaged a 1.14 rating during the final three months of 2023 and earned his first MVP medal in Jönköping, where he posted a tournament-high 1.36 rating. "Of course, it felt very nice, it was a very good moment," he recalls. "I was happy about it, but I remember that I was happier about the guys getting their first trophy in their HLTV profile. That was the most important thing for us."

Without a star player grabbing all the attention and resources (and sometimes dying unnecessarily), Monte’s team-first approach has flourished and brought out the best in everyone. They had the highest percentage of traded deaths in matches between top 20 teams in 2023 at 21.7%. And while many in the scene were obsessed with finding faults in CS2, Monte just put their head down and focused on using the game’s mechanics to their advantage, most notably its peeker's advantage.

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"I think people just approached the situation the wrong way," sdy says. "If you want to be better at something, you need to take your chances and make it work. You can’t focus on the wrong things, as a lot of players have done. I was very surprised about it.

"Everybody is playing the same game. You take your chances or you don’t. The teams and players who work the most will be at the top."

sdy ranked 27th in the extended Top players of 2023 ranking, with his small sample size preventing him from placing any higher.

Some might be surprised by the numbers he has been putting in, but not him. He says, matter-of-factly, that this was there all along. Still, he is not obsessed with proving people wrong or making the teams who passed on him look ridiculous.

"It depends on the roles," he explains. "I accepted the roles that came to me and I thought that I could make it work. But after NAVI, I understood that it’s not always like that. You need to find the right players for the right roles."

Monte are in completely unfamiliar territory heading into IEM Katowice. They haven’t played a single official game in over a month, getting a much-needed rest after a laborious year that was incredibly taxing, both physically and mentally. At the Paris Major's Challengers Stage, sdy would wake up feeling like his body "was dead." A few weeks later, he had to take a break from the game to preserve his health.

sdy is not concerned about the team coming in cold in Katowice, but he admits that practice leading up to the event wasn’t optimal. They couldn’t bootcamp ahead of the tournament because the team’s Ukrainian contingent is only allowed to leave the country for international events.

This is one of the many restrictions that sdy and his fellow Ukrainians have to deal with daily. They have to travel for two days to reach most cities where tournaments are held, crossing the Ukrainian border by car and only then getting on a plane. In addition, they have to return home immediately after events end. Less than a week separates IEM Katowice and the European RMR B tournament, yet sdy, lmbt, Volodymyr "⁠Woro2k⁠" Veletniuk and Sergiy "⁠DemQQ⁠" Demchenko will have to spend a couple of days in Ukraine between events to get the necessary permission to travel to Bucharest.

All of this adds to general fatigue and limits the amount of practice time they can have, but sdy refuses to sit around and mope. War, after all, puts everything into perspective. "You’re still playing Counter-Strike, you’re doing your job, and people are fighting with guns and dying," he says. "If you think about it, traveling for two days is not hard."

sdy is keeping a positive attitude heading into his first tournament of 2024. The minimum goal for this and every other event they attend is to reach the playoffs. After peaking at No.6 in the world rankings and claiming the trophy in Jönköping, sdy has his sights set on winning a tier-one LAN event. "It would be very nice if it happens," he says. Achieving that might even convince him to add to his tattoo portfolio.

"Maybe," he says about the possibility of getting a Monte tattoo. "It would take me being part of the history of this team. I probably am [already], but I want to win some tournaments. Why not?"