Behind kennyS' efforts to build the Chinese Katowice

The French CS icon recently moved to Shanghai, where he wants to help bring key changes to the country's scene with the help of a local multimillionaire.

"What I have matured in the past six, seven months is ten times what I had gained my entire life. China gave me a purpose, and I gave myself a purpose by finally accepting who I was and what I wanted to do and become as a person."

As Kenny "⁠kennyS⁠" Schrub sits down with me at a streamer's booth at the BLAST Premier World Final to discuss the 180-degree turn in his life, there is little in common between this person and "The Magician", the Major winner and ten-time MVP that for years wowed fans with his aggressive playstyle that forced Valve to nerf the AWP.

He remains as famous as he was at the height of his powers — he was constantly bombarded by requests for autographs throughout his stay in Singapore, even during our hour-long interview — but his shyness and introversion seem to have vanished and given way to a level of self-assurance that, he acknowledges, was lacking for most of his career and life.

Sitting before me is not kennyS the esports superstar but kennyS the businessman, content creator and Counter-Strike ambassador in China.

It has now been four months since kennyS packed his bags and moved to Shanghai. Since then, he has been busy creating content about his life in Asia and making appearances in promotional events, including a 1v1 showmatch against Oleksandr "⁠s1mple⁠" Kostyliev.

What most people don't know is that part of kennyS' motivation to move across the globe is a plan to revitalize Chinese Counter-Strike.

"We want to turn the spotlight back on China," kennyS says.

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kennyS' Chinese adventure started in March 2024, when he was invited to attend the national finals of a Counter-Strike tournament for college students set up by multimillionaire and CS aficionado Tony "Yu Qilin" Xue. According to kennyS, the two immediately hit it off and began discussing ways to work together.

Yu Qilin got into with Counter-Strike in the early 2000s, while still in college. He stopped playing the game when he went to work for his father, eventually inheriting the family business, one of the biggest aroma companies in Asia.

After picking the game back up, in 2020, he began forging relationships with the biggest players and streamers, most notably Quanqing "⁠qz⁠" Wu, a former pro who has amassed over 10 million followers on Douyin (China's version of TikTok).

That was when Yu Qilin realized the dire state of the local ecosystem.

"Not enough pro players, not enough talent, not enough teams," he tells HLTV through a translator.

Yu Qilin began racking his brain to figure out ways to drive up interest in the game and attract new sponsors with hopes of building a self-sustainable ecosystem. He took a variety of streamers under his wing and came up with several ideas for in-person events that could help the local scene and nurture talent.

Nation-wide college tournaments. Inter-regional competitions. 1vs1 events to determine the best young aimers in the country, who will get a salary and proper coaching from European coaches while living in Serbia. Luminaries being flown in to make guest appearances, participate in signing sessions and pursue commercial sponsorship opportunities with local brands.

Some of Yu Qilin's ideas are still at a conceptual stage, but his commitment to the cause seems real. He has earned the nickname "Godfather of Chinese Counter-Strike" and become a bit of a social media sensation himself.

"He has invested a lot of money into CS, that's for sure," a well-known figure in the Chinese CS scene said "We can all see he is very passionate about the game. He's definitely legit."

Yu Qilin is not the first wealthy person to invest in esports as a passion project, and he certainly won't be the last. And in cases like this, there's always the risk that one day, these people will lose interest and move on to something different, leaving the scene worse off than when they found it.

When I raised that the community might have such concerns, he said: "I don't need to be the person on top, I don't need to be the only person putting in money. Once there are enough sponsors and enough attention to the game, these spots will fill themselves."

His most ambitious project, announced at the end of August, is an annual Valve-ranked CS tournament called the "Yu Qilin CS2 International Championship," featuring ten teams and a $1 million prize pool.

kennyS, the ambassador for the event, explains how they hope to turn Yancheng, a city in the eastern province of Jiangsu with a population of almost 7 million, into the "Chinese Katowice."

"The government policy in that region is gaming-oriented," kennyS starts by saying. "They want to bring gaming to the province. We are familiar with the city, and every event we've done there has been a success.

"The Shanghai Major is definitely going to be a success, there's no doubt about it. But we need China to be more involved in the ecosystem. The passion the players show for their favorite players in China is really different. It's on another level. It feels like you're a worldwide famous singer or a huge football player."

He adds: "Did you ever hear of Katowice before IEM? No? Exactly! But now Katowice is a massive place in esports. And that's what we're going to do with Yancheng."

kennyS says negotiations are ongoing for the first edition of the event to take place in 2025, though he knows how hard it will be to get a spot on an already-congested event calendar. Because of that, taking a long-term perspective may be the safest option. "It's a huge project we want to replicate over the years," he insists. "Three to five years."

"I'm in charge of connecting us to Europe and some TOs. I'm not pretending I can organize a tournament of this size. But I know what the players want and like. I know what the audiences want and like."

And the Chinese fans can't seem to get enough of kennyS, who is on track to reach 1 million followers on Douyin. He had been to China several times during his playing career and knew his playstyle made him a fan favorite — "which is why m0NESY is probably everyone's favorite player in China right now," he points out —, so his popularity there didn't come as a surprise to him.

But for those on the outside, it might be striking to see how big Counter-Strike remains in China, despite the country's lack of success in the game. Long gone are the days when TYLOO were a regular presence in international tournaments, and you have to go back nearly two decades to find records of Chinese teams winning international CS tournaments against the best teams in the world.

This year's Shanghai Major, a watershed moment for Asian Counter-Strike, did not feature a local player beyond the Opening Stage. At the same time, The MongolZ have emerged as a force in the global game, capturing the hearts and minds of fans everywhere.

"That just shows how passionate the Chinese are," kennyS explains. "Because they don't even have a [local] team to look up to. They cannot find that patriotic happiness they deserve."

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"Ironically, it feels that in 2017, 2018, the Chinese scene was in better shape than now," said Gavin "baselineJ" Li. "Back then, we had a bit of a professional scene. We had captainMo, BnTeT, xccurate, DD.

"They were making deep runs, too. The FACEIT Major, IEM Sydney… And we had tournaments in China. But then COVID came and everything shut down."

For baselineJ, a Chinese content creator who lived in Canada for several years, being a professional CS player in China has proved near impossible since the pandemic. "There are just not enough events here," he noted. "Our region has just been segregated for so long. The communication was severed."

baselineJ moved to Vancouver in 2005 at the age of 15. As a "skinny Asian kid in a public high school" who didn't speak English, he struggled socially and experienced constant bullying. It was through Counter-Strike that he was able to find a way to connect to other people. Back then, there was a vibrant scene in North America with active leagues and top players to look up to, like Griffin "⁠shaGuar⁠" Benger, Matt "⁠bl00dsh0t⁠" Stevenson and Danny "⁠fRoD⁠" Montaner.

"For the first time in my adolescent life, I was able to identify myself with a community," he explained. "We would work on our strats all night and then scrim against like n0thing or Hiko and get absolutely destroyed, but that didn't matter. I found my people."

After graduating from university, baselineJ returned to China, where he found work in various industries like finance, consulting, film, and education.

It would not be until his thirties that he became actively involved with China's Counter-Strike scene. With nothing to do during COVID lockdown, he turned to content creation, initially posting tribute videos to Kobe Bryant following the basketball icon's tragic passing in January 2020 before branching out to gaming content and eventually CS content exclusively.

He has gone on to make guest appearances on the ESL Pro League 18 and IEM Chengdu broadcasts.

"When I interviewed NiKo and karrigan, we were kind of playing around, and I told NiKo that he had VALORANT in his name," baselineJ recalled. "I clipped that into a 32-second video, and it got one million views overnight."

That anecdote helps explain the allure of China, with its millions of potential consumers, even though hosting events in this country might come at the cost of a traditional segment of viewers. The Shanghai Major's viewership figures have cratered when compared to Copenhagen due to the "inconvenient time zones" for regions like Europe and Brazil. It is worth pointing out, however, that Esports Charts' reports do not include data from Chinese platforms.

baselineJ has no doubt that there has been a surge of interest from Chinese gamers in Counter-Strike since the Shanghai Major was announced last year at the CS Asia Championships.

"We easily have a gaming population of over 100 million active players," he said. "So it doesn't matter if games like League, Crossfire, Valorant, or any other game is popular. Counter-Strike will always have a massive audience. I know around ten Chinese CS streamers that, whenever they stream, they get 10k concurrent viewers, sometimes 20k. Now kennyS is one of them. They could all be streaming simultaneously and each would have 10k. It's insane.

"We all wish our pro teams could be more competitive like their Valorant counterparts, but it starts with a healthy, year-round domestic league, or something that includes Mongolia and other Asian countries. Whoever pools the funds and resources to make it happen will be etched in Chinese Counter-Strike history."

"I said this on air at IEM Chengdu and I'll say it again and again: bringing more S-tier events to China will do wonders to reinvigorate the Asian scene as a whole. With the best players around the world coming to China and putting on a show up close, imagine how many young players would be inspired to start their grind to the top."

But even with a potentially large player base and more regular LAN events, questions remain about whether more Chinese organizations will get on board. And China is still waiting for the rise of its first true Counter-Strike icon, the sort of inspirational figure that youngsters can look up to and try to emulate, as Zheng "ZmjjKK" Yongkang has done in VALORANT.

Many hoped that Yi "⁠JamYoung⁠" Yang was on his way to becoming a torch-bearer for Chinese CS, but the TYLOO player is rumored to be switching to VALORANT in 2025.

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"KangKang and EDG winning VALORANT Champions has of course given a lot of new players to VALORANT," kennyS says. "That's also why I'm here. My being here awakens the love for Counter-Strike in many players.

"But that's not enough, and that's why we want to build a whole ecosystem. There are a lot of good players in China. They just need the structure."

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kennyS' days in Shanghai are full, long and well-organized. He works out every morning and has Chinese lessons after lunch. The afternoons are filled with business meetings to keep all his affairs, in China and back home, in order. He usually streams between 9 pm and 1:30 am, and sometimes there are some tasks he still needs to handle afterward.

The strict routine keeps him energized. "I want to reach my peak as a human being, physically and mentally," he says, admitting, with the benefit of hindsight, that he now has the discipline and consistency he lacked during his playing days.

"If I had the mindset in my career that I have now, I could have done much better," he notes. "But what I went through made me who I am and helped me make this decision. There is no time for regret.

"I'm going to use what I have now to do better things and show a better example. Because I haven't been the best example."

Leaving everything behind to move across the globe all by himself, as daunting as it might sound, has given him a purpose in life and equipped him with the tools to break out of what he describes as a "vegetative state of mind."

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kennyS sees China as the "land of opportunities," the place where he can use all he learned during his career while developing new skills and improving himself. But he quickly points out that money was not the motivation behind his move.

"Wherever I go, I can make money," he says. "I was doing that in the West. But I didn't like what I was doing. It just seemed like survival and not proper ambition.

"I was not happy, and people could see that. I disappointed many people by being the way I was, a non-ambitious, passive and comfortable person who was just not able to handle his emotions and figure out how to face his demons."

kennyS' enthusiasm for developing Chinese Counter-Strike feels genuine, but he speaks of some of the things he wants to implement in vague terms. It leaves me wondering whether there is an actual roadmap that he is keeping close to his chest or if he is, in some ways, improvising as he goes along, at least until he has a solid grasp of the Chinese language (which he estimates will take approximately six months) and a better perception of the needs on the ground.

As we discuss how long it might take for China to compete at the highest level, kennyS shares a lofty personal goal:

To have a Chinese Major winner.

"That's a beautiful dream to have," he says. "At least a Chinese player winning the Major would be a dream, obviously.

"A goal like that? I think we can give it three years. Three years is a good expectation. Because we're just starting to do all this work. Mr. Yu Qilin has been investing and spending a lot of his resources for more than a year. He consistently wants to do more and so do I. And we will.

"At some point, we will be able to get some really good talents. Because they have the potential."