Does age matter?

The short answer is yes, it does.

There’s a long answer too, but we’re the TLDR newsletter; we don’t do long answers.

But someone who does is our old friend NER0 - or Harry, as we call him, ‘cos we’re tight like that - who used to write and rock socials for us. Now he works at HLTV, because he liked long answers.

He looked at a whole bunch of data and wrote a whole bunch of big words to come to the same conclusion that we did - you get worse after 25, generally.

Of course, there are outliers, and mitigating circumstances. Age is just a number, after all - but so is HLTV rating, and the answer to the question “how many Majors have you won, you geriatric Ovaltine drinking Werthers consuming super-boomer?”.

You can argue that age is somewhat intertwined with changing priorities in life, with changing roles - and yes, that is true - but those changing priorities can also be because you’re not able to keep up with 14 hour practice days and zoomer reactions.

Us boomers at TLDR pulled a hamstring just thinking about trying to outAWP m0nesy.

Does that mean that signing a 27 year old is never a good idea? No, of course not; but you should probably have a plan for them to be something that isn’t a mega-fragger. Top level Counter-Strike is volatile, and being the best six months ago is an age in this game.

Perhaps it’s time we consider that age might just be more of a factor than the older pros want you to believe. It’s nice to think that at 29 years old you’ll be even better than you were at 23, but for the vast majority of players, that ain’t realistic.

Or just become an IGL. Can’t be that hard. Call a few rush B’s, know a handful of smokes and sound intelligent, and you’ll already be set to beat Evil Geniuses. Like everyone else.