Stat Check: Spirit are right to be ruthless despite Cologne success

The cold-hearted removal of zont1x is proof Spirit have learned from the aftermath of Shanghai 2024.

When Andrey "⁠tN1R⁠" Tatarinovich signed for HEROIC in early 2025, only tier two addicts or stats page bookmarkers would have known what was to come next.

Even his most ardent fan, though, would have struggled to see how he would actually improve his rating, from 1.15 with GUN5 in 2024 to 1.17 in 2025 with HEROIC.

It's a level of success that has been justly rewarded with interest from the very top tier, and now the chance to play alongside Danil "⁠donk⁠" Kryshkovets in Team Spirit.

Read more

Sources: tN1R to join Spirit after EWC

It's a move long in the making, with Spirit's interest stretching back to before the summer break, and one that makes a lot of sense.

tN1R was a Russophone aggressive lurker with huge firepower when the main criticism of Spirit was a reliance on donk for nearly all of their aggression and firepower.

And it is good that Spirit's win at IEM Cologne, thanks to another Herculean effort from donk, did not stop them pulling the trigger on the clause in tN1R's contract. He's a talent you cannot pass up on.

tN1R only played one Big Event in the first half of 2025 (A 1.17 rating at IEM Dallas) but every time tougher opposition turned up he passed the test. He has a 1.17 rating vs top 5 teams, 1.16 vs top 20, and 1.18 overall on LAN this year. The stats which make this pizza chart look so good are legitimate.

A roster of just five players did mean a tough decision at Spirit, however. After Shanghai, Boris "⁠magixx⁠" Vorobiev earned a stay of execution thanks to a fantastic playoff performance despite his tough positions. After Cologne, Myroslav "⁠zont1x⁠" Plakhotia may feel he had earned the same: He has been consistently solid as an anchor for Spirit and is still just 20-years-old.

Instead, Spirit have shown they can be ruthless too by getting rid of both. Their summer plan, of adding both tN1R and Ivan "⁠zweih⁠" Gogin, has been enacted in time for a run at the Budapest Major and Vitality's crown.

If you were looking at it in June, you couldn't find a more suited duo to taking Spirit to the next level on paper — and reducing their reliance on donk.

But we know Counter-Strike is more complicated than that. magixx and zont1x, for all people bemoan the 'donk vs 9' nature of Spirit, did rightfully earn plaudits for their selflessness and anchor play.

tN1R and zweih fit in pretty well on CT side in terms of positions, but intangibles will be harder to precisely measure.

One way tN1R will hope to have an impact is vocally; zont1x was "doing a lot of micro-managing and communicating during the game" according to Mareks "⁠YEKINDAR⁠" Gaļinskis on HLTV Confirmed, but he was not exactly the cheerleader type, or one to mince his words.

In-game, tN1R can fill some of that comms gap given that he was moved to map control roles at the end of his time in HEROIC precisely because he was naturally talkative. Adding a positive voice to Spirit should help, with zweih able to focus on his crosshair in his anchor positions.

This is even more true on T side, where bodyshot merchant zont1x often struggled to have the same impact as on CT — the Ukrainian had a 1.13 CT rating in CS2 in Spirit, compared to a 1.04 on T.

Where zont1x was a reliable soldier, tN1R can be an x-factor, a commando troop able to pull off aggressive moves to make Spirit more unpredictable in the mid-round.

Before, you knew Spirit would wait for donk to be in position before trying to hit your site. Now, tN1R could appear at any moment.

YEKINDAR is not the only to raise the point that Spirit "need three sacrifical players when you have donk and sh1ro" and that tN1R is not one, leaving the whole system in need of a re-thinking. But could that be a good thing for a team that has disappeared on the rare occasions donk has been countered effectively?

It is hard to imagine that a player as good as donk will drop off too much from the loss of his supportive core. Spirit, when they only had two strong fraggers, were wise to build an ultra-sacrificial trio for donk but that does not mean that he needed that to succeed; it was just the best allocation of resources at that time.

tN1R is statistically superior to zont1x in almost every measure. And while zont1x is framed as a support player, the presence of magixx means he had a cushier role than we sometimes imagine.

zont1x had a target CT rating (the average rating of players in his positions) of 1.02 in Spirit, while magixx had 0.99. He was not entrying much on T side either, with only 20.3% of his deaths being traded.

On T side, zont1x was the primary lurker in similar spots to the likes of Robin "⁠ropz⁠" Kool, Valeriy "⁠b1t⁠" Vakhovskiy, and Lotan "⁠Spinx⁠" Giladi but rarely had the output to match. Some of this will be down to donk and the system (zont1x did have a lot of utility responsibility) but the system would have been designed differently if his lurks had more of a bite.

The fact of the matter is that tN1R is a true third star in a way zont1x never could be. He excels at trading, giving him synergy with donk, while his mid-round aggression will help Dmitry "⁠sh1ro⁠" Sokolov have more favorable clutch and late-round situations.

There is always a risk to any move, especially one to a core capable of winning Katowice, the Major, and Cologne. There's an argument to be had about whether you could have kept zont1x in magixx's roles instead of the raw and untested zweih.

But Spirit, implicitly based on these moves, believe internally that to be a truly consistent championship-tier team they need a foundation stronger than what they had.

magixx's roles would not have been easy for zont1x to adapt to either, and Sergey "⁠hally⁠" Shavaev (after coaching him for so long in the academy and main roster) would know better than anyone if the Ukrainian was capable. In that context, moving on a 17-year-old with unknown potential like zweih is a justifiable risk. We, and Spirit, know zont1x's ceiling.

That does not mean zont1x cannot go and be a fantastic anchor-lurker for another team. His stoicism is visible on the server, with how calm he is under pressure, and plenty of teams could use his defensive talents: Falcons, FaZe, and Liquid all have uncomfortable or underperforming anchors.

But Spirit are right to move for tN1R early. If donk vs 9 is seen as a bad long-term strategy, a star lurker like tN1R or Evgenii "⁠FL1T⁠" Lebedev was the only way out of the hole. sh1ro is a fantastic clutcher AWP or rifle, and dovetails fantastically with donk, but the mid-round needed something extra.

With tN1R, and if zweih has the time to make magixx's bitch roles work for him, Spirit are hoping they can be a well-rounded team around donk. Even when they have succeeded, that is not an apt description for the Spirit we are used to.

Mathieu "⁠ZywOo⁠" Herbaut and Oleksandr "⁠s1mple⁠" Kostyliev were able to succeed with imbalanced rosters. But they were at their best when the pieces around them were up to scratch: NAVI with Ilya "⁠Perfecto⁠" Zalutskiy and b1t, or Vitality after the additions of Spinx and later ropz.

Who's to say that we won't look back on Spirit with tN1R as a similarly transformative process?

Read more

Stat Check: How zweih's firepower can transform Spirit