Counter-Strike is a simple game. 10 players run around a map headshotting each other for 45 minutes, and at the end, Vitality always win.

But if that’s the case, why are there so many mysteries surrounding the game?

And no, we’re not talking about if flusha - or that German fella in your pug - was cheating, or whether or not sub-tick is the reason CS2 feels like sh-t. We’re talking about real, tangible, explainable things within the pro scene that have left people scratching their noggins for years.

Inspired by our very own aizyesque’s look at why blameF has ended up on BIG of all places, we’re going to take a look at some of these mysteries, starting with the Great Dane himself.

If so good, why so bad?

blameF is one of modern Counter-Strike’s most recognisable figures. A big, hulking Viking, he stepped into the giant-sized hole left by pasha’s biceps when the Pole called time on his career.

He’s also appeared on the HLTV top 20 four times, was the captain of the Complexity juggernaut, and played for legendary organisations like Astralis and fnatic. The problem, though, is that while it all looks very good on paper, the reality is far different.

Almost the entirety of the juggernaut era was played out online, and Astralis and fnatic were far, far past their best when blameF donned the jerseys. As for Majors or his trophy cabinet? Well, he has a single online BLAST trophy to his name, and he’s only ever featured at three Majors.

Despite that, blameF has literally never had a bad year individually. Seriously, his stats are incredible. In his four years playing for Complexity and Astralis, his lowest-rated year against top 30 opponents was in 2021, when he still finished with a very high 1.15 rating. That’s dipped a bit since signing for fnatic, but despite what Striker says, there is something to be said about your ability to frag when playing for a worse team.

But, of course, HLTV ratings aren’t everything.

They’re a solid way to see if a player is good on face value, but system, playstyle, and even eye test go a long way in determining why - or why not - a player is or isn’t on a team capable of winning trophies - and in blameF’s case, playstyle is everything.

Contrary to popular belief, Mr. Bremer is a pretty versatile player. At least when he wants to be.

He’s capable of entrying (although doesn’t open rounds as frequently as we’d all like), trading, and lurking to a level not many other players can claim to be. He’s also not really a baiter, or at least not in the way you might think he is, and that’s even something he’s consciously tried to change as he’s progressed in his career.

As he said in that interview with BLAST.tv, he was very passive during his days on Complexity, but that was because the system and players on the team commanded him to be. Sure, he was the IGL, and that makes it seem slightly more egregious, but I don’t see anyone harping on at ropz, frozen, or Spinx for similar reasons nowadays.

But blameF has also changed where he places himself in systems since then. On Complexity, he lurked more often, while on his more recent teams, he’s a pack player. That’s where playstyle and eyetest start to become a thing.

On those teams, he wasn’t always instantly trading as many star pack players do. Instead, he’d restrict enemy-team multi-kill potential by waiting an extra couple of seconds longer, relying on his solid aim to get the kill when the opponent slightly drops their guard.

As effective as that can be, it’s also a problem for blameF.

It’s just not a normal way of playing, and the time it took to do anything else had already damaged his reputation too much. To play for a Vitality, or even a MOUZ, FaZe, NAVI, Liquid, or any other top team of the past five years you want to talk about, he would have needed to play in a way far closer to the meta and not so individualistic, and he just… didn’t.

The only teams in which blameF’s playstyle would truly benefit are ones with AWP IGLs, which nowadays are few and far between. If HEROIC had prescience, or simply realised that stavn was rubbish, he could have thrived in cadiaN’s system, and then we’d be having a different conversation.

In that world, blameF has probably won tournaments. In that world, he’d also played at more Majors and perhaps even won one.

At 28 and slightly past his prime, it’s a mystery we’ll never fully know the answer to, but it’s at least in someway solveable. Why he’s IGLing again, though, that’s anyone’s guess. It does seem to be going well for him at least.

The heimlich maneuver

If NiKo is the greatest rifler in CS:GO history and remains strong in CS2, then why hasn’t he won a Major? Most people will tell you that it was because he personally choked, but is that really the case?

Well, maybe. Let’s take a look at his Major finals first.

There’s two of them, with both being infamous for different reasons. In one, a late rotate to the B site sealed Cloud9’s comeback to OT from 15-11, and in the other, a Deagle whiff from the man himself was the final nail in G2’s coffin, handing NAVI their first Major trophy.

In Boston versus Cloud9, it’s undeniable that NiKo didn’t have his best game. At 12-23 on Mirage, he was the lowest-rated player on the server. His 16-20 on Overpass was middle of the pack for FaZe, but a better performance may have prevented Cloud9 from getting back into the series. On Inferno, though, where it really mattered, NiKo topfragged. That time, whether you want to admit it, it was the calling of karrigan that cost NiKo his Major crown.

Stockholm was a very different story. In Stockholm, G2, featuring AMANEK, nexa, and JACKZ, were huge underdogs against a NAVI team that had been dominant for months. In the 2-0 defeat, NiKo was the only player to go positive for G2, ending the series 52-50 with a 1.13 rating.

Does that sound like someone choking to you? Maybe if you use the Deagle whiff as evidence, but I’ve seen NiKo hit that shot countless times, and I know that it was the mild inaccuracy of the Deagle that placed the egg on NiKo’s face, not NiKo himself.

More recent Majors have also brought NiKo’s ability to choke into question. At the Paris Major, G2 were eliminated from the Legends Stage with a 1-3 record. NiKo went negative in their final game against fnatic, with poor showings in both of their map losses, but he did pick up a 1.53 rating in map one.

In Austin, NiKo’s Falcons were eliminated in Stage 2. Once again, they had a 1-3 record, and were dumped out by MIBR after throwing what was considered to be an unloseable round. Admittedly, NiKo wasn’t great in this series either, and especially on map three, but it’s important to remember that it takes a team to throw that 3v5.

There are other results I could bring up. GamerLegion in the Rio RMR, NAVI in Copenhagen, FaZe in Shanghai. But I could also point out that NiKo was the highest-rated player on his team in Paris (1.18) and Austin (1.10), or that he was in MVP form in Boston (1.25) and Stockholm (1.36).

I could even bring up his 1.35-rated IEM Cologne 2023 MVP, or his similarly strong 1.17 rating in the Katowice win that year. All players also dream of winning those two events, and the choking narrative was suddenly very quiet then.

Do you see what I’m getting at? Do you see how it might be unreasonable to expect NiKo to always be a superstar, hard-carrying his teams? Do you see how it might also be slightly unfair to only criticise NiKo when he’s played on teams with the likes of m0NESY, GuardiaN, rain, and a host of other elite talents, and not criticise any of them for these defeats?

The truth of the matter is that the choking narrative is very convenient for the great unwashed; it’s something that is easily weaponised by the average player who can’t possibly fathom the mental pressure of elite-level competition, and it’s something that is only really caused by the weight of expectation.

Perhaps more than any other player in history, NiKo is expected to win a Major. Now labelled as the greatest player to never lift one, his peak surpasses that of his former teammate GuardiaN, and the expectations that it creates and the way that expectation builds after each defeat is undoubtedly too much for any one man to handle.

It’s something he’s spoke about in detail throughout the past few years, and it’s one of the reasons why he wanted to play under zonic. NiKo alone isn’t going to tackle this perceived choking problem. A team will, because a team - even in the case of Spirit - is what wins Counter-Strike tournaments.

And the funniest part about it all? This mystery, this “choking problem”, you’ll all suddenly forget it was a thing if and when he does finally get his Major. And that, to me, is the saddest part.

The 30-degree window

Remember draken? He took a trip to VALORANT and faded out of the limelight in recent years, but prior to the online era, he was the best AWPer in Sweden.

I appreciate that’s not saying much, but he was a legitimately decent AWPer for top ten teams.

There was this funny thing about draken, though. He had a thirty-degree window. And by that, I mean that he seemingly could only ever hit the hard shots. If they walked into the angle he was holding, there was no chance, but a flick halfway off his screen? He got the kill every. damn. time.

There’s some hyperbole to that, obviously, but it really was a trend within his gameplay. But why did that happen? How is it that an AWPer playing for a top ten team can become known for only being good at AWPing if he can’t actually see the enemy?

Well, it’s not something we can prove statistically. Instead, we need to get a bit LinkedIn with it.

And by that, I don’t mean cringe-posting about abusing our kids for life lessons of torturous morning routines.

draken, or William Sundin, is the son of Per Sundin. While that name might not mean anything to you, he’s a big deal in the Swedish music industry, who is currently the CEO of Pop House Entertainment and was previously the managing director for Universal Music Sweden.

As you can imagine, that makes him fairly wealthy.

This, as it does with many rich kids, has a knock-on effect. In the case of draken, that knock-on effect was that he was a little bit lazy and a little bit arrogant. As former teammates have said in interviews, he often wouldn’t efficiently practice, or even turn up at all.

Now apply this to your own game, especially if you’re an AWPer. What happens if you don’t practice or warm up? What happens if you play sporadically? I’m willing to guess you’ll still hit some flicks, or maybe hit a headshot from residual crosshair placement, but those easy shots when you’re holding the angle or kills you need to spray for? They suddenly become much harder.

At the pro level, where everyone is practicing all the time, the effect of that is tenfold. So while this isn’t something we can fully work through with stats or via the eyetest like with the previous two players, it’s certainly a mystery that has a potentially obvious answer.

And that’s just kinda the case with all of these CS “mysteries”. It’s easy to say that blameF is a baiter, NiKo is a choker, or that draken has the magical ability to whiff unless it’s an unreal shot, but it’s also easy to take a deeper look and answer the questions as to why those narratives became a thing in the first place.

In most instances, it’s because they’re the easy way out for faux-analysts of the game, and the biggest problem with that is that the faux-analysts are typically the loudest.