The EVPs and Best Five of IEM Katowice 2025

The first set of all-important Super Elite EVPs are handed out for this year.

Katowice has been an unhappy hunting ground for Mathieu "⁠ZywOo⁠" Herbaut and Vitality but, in their first try with new boy Robin "⁠ropz⁠" Kool, that narrative has been firmly expelled.

Dan "⁠apEX⁠" Madesclaire had to wait 11 years since his first entry to Spodek arena in 2014 before he could get his hands on the big-eared trophy, and the wait was worth it.

Naturally, star man ZywOo took over to help them secure the trophy. It was a fairly ordinary group stage by his standards, but he exploded in the arena and ended the grand final with a whopping 1.69 rating.

The huge effort put him up to 14 Big Event MVPs, the same as rival Oleksandr "⁠s1mple⁠" Kostyliev, and just one behind the Ukrainian in LAN MVPs (the score left 15-16).

Read more

ZywOo: "You can see why ropz f**ked us in Shanghai; finally we got this player on our side"

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What's WPA?

A new metric has been added to our EVP charts for this tournament as part of the development process for rating 3.0.

WPA, or win probability added, looks at each kill and sees how much it changes a team's chance of winning the round. That includes each team's economic situation, whether the bomb is planted, and how many players are alive on each team.

While it is still a very early version of the build (and exact figures may change when it is eventually deployed), we are confident enough in the new data that it will now impact EVP decisions — meaning it makes sense to include it on the radars.

For transparency, the committee also had access to economy-adjusted stats for kills, damage, deaths, and KAST, where we looked at individual equipment value in each gunfight to adjust the value of each action.

In combination with the usual important metrics, these new metrics will help make the top 20 and EVP lists even more accurate to what actually moves the needle in a round, event, or year.

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Danil "⁠donk⁠" Kryshkovets may not have repeated his 2024 Katowice heroics but, until a quiet final, he was coming pretty damn close.

He had a 1.52 rating in Spirit's map wins, and there was a humongous gap of 0.38 between his 1.25 kills per round win and Dmitry "⁠sh1ro⁠" Sokolov's 0.87 in second place on the team.

A 55-frag, 1.55-rated, semi-final against Natus Vincere was the highlight but donk's consistency made an EVP inevitable even before that match kicked off.

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"The plan is to win tournaments," ropz told HLTV in January. "They haven't won a Katowice, so maybe I'll help them with that."

Half-joke it may have been, but it's come true at the first attempt for ropz whose 1.43 T side rating was second only to teammate ZywOo in Poland.

Vitality made it to the final as a team but it was ropz's 2.18-rated Dust2 grand final opener that set the tone for what was to follow.

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Valeriy "⁠b1t⁠" Vakhovskiy started Katowice by farming FURIA for a 1.93 rating across two maps, and was also (just) top of the board with a 1.49 rating in the seeding match against The MongolZ.

Those two stomps (both against top 10 teams) help make b1t's raw stats look as good as they do and might have got him an EVP on their own, but he was also fantastic in Natus Vincere's eventual semi-final defeat against Spirit.

Our WPA metric has him at a +3.88 for the semi-final, an indication that he put up a worthier fight than his 1.08 rating might imply and a fact that assured him a solid EVP.

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Ismailcan "⁠XANTARES⁠" Dörtkardeş and donk are the only players to have awards at both events of 2025 so far as the Turk looks to build on his #15 placing in 2024's top 20.

Eternal Fire have broken into the top five of our rankings with Samet "⁠jottAAA⁠" Köklü adding a bit of spice to a lineup that always had this potential.

But make no mistake, it's XANTARES who is firing the Eternal Fire furnace. 0.19 opening kills per round tell you something about his playstyle, but 111 damage per round win tells you more about his level.

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Honorable Mentions

apEX's fantastic playoffs, where he was above a 1.30 rating in four of the five maps, put him in touching distance of an EVP but he's unlucky that this is the first event we have access to eco-adjusted data. In terms of WPA, he sat at +0.61, only just above William "⁠mezii⁠" Merriman in 4th on his team, and he had a 33-8 K-D against low buys in playoffs (around 153 ADR versus ecos and forces). In what was already a tight case after a quiet group stage, that kept him below the EVP mark.

Shahar "⁠flameZ⁠" Shushan was also very close to an award, but did a lot of his best work in the group stage and in the second halves of games where Vitality had dominated the first. He also had a 1.61 rating in a map loss against FaZe (and struggled badly in the OT decider), which counted for less than if his impact had led to a win.

Usukhbayar "⁠910⁠" Banzragch and Garidmagnai "⁠bLitz⁠" Byambasuren also came close for The MongolZ, the former having some great peaks (2.02 vs Liquid, 1.92 vs GamerLegion, 1,71 vs Eternal Fire and the latter being their best in playoffs.

Justinas "⁠jL⁠" Lekavicius was Natus Vincere's best in the group stage win over Spirit but didn't confirm his EVP in the semi-final. Mihai "⁠iM⁠" Ivan was a step behind the Natus Vincere fragging core trio in WPA and, like jL, needed a stronger semi to sneak in.

A final shoutout goes to Oldřich "⁠PR⁠" Nový, the latest MOUZ NXT prodigy, who ended the event on +2.14 WPA and 1.31 kills per round win but struggled in GamerLegion's two series defeats.

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Best Five

apEX does, however, make it into the Best Five as our captain after a 64.8% T side RW% and is joined by three EVPs and the MVP.

b1t and ropz take up anchor-lurker duties, with donk, apEX, and ZywOo patrolling as the map control pack. Not bad, is it?

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The EVPs of 2025