Former Team Spirit IGL chopper has retired from competitive CS2 and we're taking a look at why his career ended up being one of the most overrated in Counter-Strike history.
Now that chopper has retired, do you know what we’re not doing? We’re not doing some revisionism to claim he was ever a great IGL.
“B-but he made Major playoffs with Spirit before he had donk!” - yeah, we don’t give a f-ck. It wasn’t like he had a terrible team, either. Virtually all of them were very highly rated youngsters and have mostly been tier one mainstays since - two of them have even won Majors in the years since.
Besides, we also really don’t care what an IGL can do at one off tournaments. What did chopper do for the rest of those years? Where were his teams then? And don’t cry “partner system”, because Snappi and Jame both went and had success at ESL Challenger events so they could be in tier one consistently.
Even when chopper had donk he wasn’t impressive. They wouldn’t have benched him if he was. No, instead it was the same egregiously stale stratbook - most likely created by hally because chopper didn’t actually have the juice to make his own - and the same disappointing tournament results ill-befitting of the star at his disposal.
It’s why we’ve never really cared that Spirit won the Major, Cologne, and Katowice. Because during that time, they never actually had anything close to an era. They never defined sh-t.
Spirit under chopper were a team with a top three AWPer and also the most individually skilled player to ever touch CS, and the odds of them winning consecutive trophies were about as high as anyone reading or writing this article having sex.
Meaning that it probably did happen once or twice, but it’s still bloody rare.
Your opinions on chopper should be formed purely from this zont1x interview. chopper didn’t have it in him to become a great IGL, and if it wasn’t for donk, his retirement wouldn’t be more than a half-arsed mention in the “Everything Else” section.
An incredibly poor leader, with an entirely overrated end to his career. Good riddance, we say.
And while we’re at it, how about we also say “let’s get donk a real, experienced IGL”? Because it’s either that or saying “Congratulations to Vitality for winning Team of the Year” for years to come.
