Who were the most improved players at the end of CS:GO?

In the relentless battleground of professional Counter-Strike where the gap between victory and defeat is often razor-thin, the evolution of a player is a mesmerizing spectacle. Seeing a player slowly climb their way from a pug-star to a superstar is the ultimate CS hero's journey.

Over the course of the waning months at the end of CS:GO, we saw established organizations take gambles on new names like Mihai "iM" Ivan and Justinas "jL" Lekavicius that had stunning performances at the Paris Major and organizations like Liquid gamble on players like Aleks "Rainwaker" Petrov and Robert "Patsi" Isyanov. However, as the dust settles on CS:GO and we move into CS2, I wanted to take a look at the players who've been at the top, stayed there, and reinvented themselves in 2023.

The criteria for this list were fairly simple. I chose players with at least 50 LAN maps prior to 2023 and 20 LAN maps in 2023, both against top 20 opposition. This ensures the players we analyze are of the highest caliber and have a decent body of data for a suitable sample size. Add it all up and five names emerge at the top: Karim "Krimbo" Moussa, Viktor "sdy" Orudzhev, Nils "k1to" Gruhne, David "frozen" Čerňanský, and Olek "hades" Miskiewicz. Let's take a look at each of them and what precisely marked 2023 as a turning point for their career.

Note that the cutoff date for data collection was the final day of Gamers8 2023, August 20th.

Krimbo

When Krimbo was brought into BIG in early 2022, he was set to replace a demoted k1to. This would be the first of many attempts by the German organization to utilize their academy squad to promote young players. The team were proud of their developmental efforts, with captain Johannes "⁠tabseN⁠" Wodarz claiming "Krimbo is by far the best talent we've had in Germany in years."

While the young player excelled in online, low-pressure events like the ones he played in his previous squads, the LAN atmosphere proved slightly difficult for Krimbo to adjust to. At EPL 15, his first LAN event with the squad, he put up only a 0.92 rating. The Antwerp Major marked another low point with a 0.93 rating. At IEM Dallas, BIG achieved 3-4th place, a great result for the squad, with the youngster putting up an admirable 1.05 rating. At that event, Krimbo explained, "my mentality wasn't the best half a year ago I would say, and I really worked on it."

That has been BIG's best S-tier event placement since. After a last-place finish at BLAST Spring Final, BIG became a revolving door of roster moves. In the five remaining LAN events of the year, BIG fielded four different rosters. With no time to adjust to the tier-one environment with a stable roster, it's tough to blame Krimbo for his performance.

As time went on, Krimbo gained experience and with 2023 came time in a stable core. BIG only suffered one roster move in the first half of the year, promoting Elias "s1n" Stein, whom Krimbo had experience with on the Academy squad. In addition, Krimbo was handed more active roles with bigger payoffs, with tabseN noting "he has taken a lot of responsibility to play certain positions". At BIG's best event of the year, IEM Rio 2023, Krimbo topped BIG's charts. At ESL Pro League Season 18, he finished with a 1.17 rating, including top fragging against Monte and Heroic to clinch a playoff berth.

Krimbo's skill was apparent from the very beginning. Teammates and analysts alike praised him as the next prodigal son of German Counter-Strike. After a tumultuous first year, it's no surprise to see Krimbo finally reaching the heights we were promised.

sdy

Counter-Strike's most notorious revenge story of the past few years, sdy's rise from his burnt ashes in NAVI truly is a sight to behold: the ideal "second chance" story. Dropped into an Intel Grand Slam and Major-winning squad, results weren't just expected, but required. sdy had experience on a previous Spirit roster, but those glory days were far behind him. The new team actually started off incredibly well, winning their first event with sdy, BLAST Spring Final 2022. With his loan dependent on his performance at that event, it was enough for Andrey "B1ad3" Gorodenskiy to pull the trigger and add sdy on a permanent basis.

Unfortunately, sdy's addition came at an incredibly inopportune time, with the squad just removing famed IGL Kirill "⁠Boombl4⁠" Mikhailov. Changing the guard from Boombl4 to four-time HLTV Top Ten rifler, but not IGL, Denis "electroNic" Sharipov left the squad underpowered in both firepower and calling ability, a fatal combination. Like a canoe without a coxswain, NAVI were utterly lifeless, just drifting in the waters of mediocrity (relative to expectations, of course).

Over time, the honeymoon faded. After winning BLAST Spring Final came second place at Cologne, then quarters at EPL and the Major. Add to NAVI's dwindling results constant position shuffles, talk of s1mple potentially taking a break, and frustration boiling over into officials, it's easy to see how any player new to arenas would struggle.

When the face of the team proclaimed NAVI "need to finally decide with what roster we want to continue in 2023", sdy's time was up. NAVI half-heartedly tried a six-man setup for a single event before unceremoniously disposing of sdy.

With top-tier experience in his back pocket, sdy moved onto Monte and immediately made waves, taking Monte on an upward trajectory from 48th in the world to a top-fifteen fixture for the past five months. sdy led a band of misfits including accused cheater Sergiy "DemQQ" Demchenko and FPL-star Volodymyr "Woro2k" Veletniuk all the way to Major playoffs, defeating his former team on the way.

Moving from a team in tumult to Monte, a team that harbored less expectations and eyes, set sdy up to succeed. sdy credited his successes to the mood in Monte, explaining "it's the key factor because we have zero toxicity in the team, zero." Transitioning from a simple role rifler in a larger system to an IGL in his own team also allowed sdy to play the way he wanted to in a team revolving around his calls. It was the freedom of Monte as opposed to the restriction of NAVI that has allowed sdy to break free from his "not good enough" stain in NAVI to become one of the most improved players of 2023.

k1to

k1to is the second player on our list who played on the tumultuous 2022 BIG squad. For much of the same reasons as Krimbo's stunted growth, k1to was unable to harness his full potential on the Ship of Theseus that was BIG Clan. In fact, following a period of declining performance at the start of the year, k1to was even demoted from the main squad down to BIG Academy.

However, it seemed like time away from the limelight was all k1to needed to fire him back up once more. On the Academy team, k1to absolutely farmed the lower-tier events while simultaneously using his tier-one experience to lead his surrounding youngsters, which eventually earned him a promotion back to the main squad. His time on BIG in 2023, while not exceptional, was absolutely a step forward from his previous performances, and is the bulk contributing factor to his improvement this year.

Nonetheless, the German decided during the summer player break that his time with the organization was coming to a close, commenting, "The first years in BIG were amazing, but the longer we played together the more problems we had."

k1to took his talents to OG who placed him in full support roles. Since then, his rating has obviously taken a hit. Nonetheless, that doesn't prevent k1to from being one of 2023's most improved players. From an academy demotee in 2022 to a solid role player in 2023, k1to successfully turned his career around. We've seen academy demotion be the nail in the coffin for some careers such as for Egor "flamie" Vasilyev, so it's comforting to see that it is possible to take a step back and regain the passion and drive for Counter-Strike.

frozen

2023's golden boy, frozen has exceeded the expectations placed on him by an incredibly wide margin. When Robin "ropz" Kool left MOUZ early in 2022 to join the FaZe superteam, questions arose as to who would fill the star vacuum in the team. frozen immediately stepped up to the challenge, emerging as the star-player for the German-based organization. He stepped into the passive lurk roles that frozen left behind, utilizing that annoying, thorn-in-the-side mentality to its fullest.

For the most part, MOUZ were fine in 2022. Playoffs were a consistent occurrence for the squad, and while the team didn't win anything in 2022, a semifinal finish at the Rio Major capped off what was a fairly successful year. Despite introducing academy players to the squad, MOUZ continued their stable performances. frozen ended the year with a 1.13 rating and two EVP awards, enough for him to snag 17th place in HLTV's Top Twenty Players of 2022.

As 2023 rolled around, at the ripe old age of 21, frozen became one of the veterans on the team. In a paradoxical manner, as MOUZ's achievements declined as the year progressed, frozen's individual form only became stronger. After bringing in a new IGL over the summer break, MOUZ dropped out of IEM Cologne in 9-12th place. frozen averaged a 1.27 rating over the event.

frozen has perfected the thorn-in-the-side playstyle of passive lurking, always managing to eke out an advantage when his opponents' guards are down. He dies a minuscule 0.56 times per round on average, the third lowest of any player this year and a number usually reserved for only the most passive of AWPers. Nonetheless, it's not enough for frozen, commenting "It doesn't really matter if you have good stats or not, you still feel bad if you are losing the game." It finally looks as if frozen's luck has turned around, with MOUZ sweeping NAVI in the grand finals of the last big CS:GO event at ESL Pro League Season 18 and frozen just barely missing out on the MVP of the event.

Whereas most of the names on this list are players who found themselves in tough situations in 2022 and managed to break free in 2023, frozen marks a profound difference. By all accounts, frozen was great in 2022. Somehow, beyond explanation, he's turned the dial up to eleven in 2023. Perhaps more than anyone else, frozen is one of the most improved players of 2023.

hades

When ENCE transitioned to an international lineup, they picked up hades after his strong performances in the Polish scene with Wisla Krakow. However, thrust into new heights, hades' tenure with the Finnish organization was mired by inconsistency and a struggle to show up in big LAN events. Despite averaging a 1.09 rating with the team, that number dropped to 1.02 filtered by just LAN, a weak stat line in an AWPer-dominated meta.

Although the team reached an organizational high of #2 in the world, ENCE were held back by hades' inconsistency, most obviously displayed in his 0.91 average rating in two Majors with the team. hades was benched in August and then dropped a month later, after which he would wallow around in tier-three European CS before rejoining the Polish scene with 9INE early this year.

With hades on the big green, 9INE rocketed up the world ranking, quickly becoming a mainstay in the top thirty. Once again speaking Polish, hades was back in his comfort zone. Grinding online cups and qualifiers, he quickly regained the form that ENCE saw in him back on Wisla Krakow. In an interview, hades said "The end of ENCE was pretty rough, I was in a bad space mentally, and in-game I was having bad performances. " The stress-free atmosphere of 9INE gave the AWPer the ability to find his comfort once more.

It is important to note, however, that hades' online performance is still miles better than his LAN performance, posting a 1.16 rating compared to 1.08 this year on LAN. But, with his floor lifted and his ceiling still as high as ever, hades and 9INE have become a force to be reckoned with.

While it's easy to focus on the Oleksandr "s1mple" Kostyliev and Mathieu "ZywOo" Herbauts of the world, those who consistently put up star-studded performances, we should also take the time to shift our attention to those who have made 2023 their best year ever, and by a margin at that. While many players have staked their claim in competitive Counter-Strike in 2023, these five players have stood out from the rest. In either revitalizing their career or reaching even higher highs previously thought untouchable, these five more than any were the most improved players at the tail end of CS:GO.