Welcome to stunning Belgrade.

In January. It’s minus six some mornings.

The city is at times breathtakingly beautiful - from the view from the middle of the bridge, with parallel skylines bracketing the Danube, illuminated by the metropolitan lights that come with any European capital city, to the snow-topped fortress threateningly littered with military equipment.

It, simultaneously, has a post-Soviet communism-chic distric that almost mockingly sits opposite the capitalist lighthouse that is the Hyatt Regency, a five-star hotel that saw the afterparty for the HLTV Awards.

For some reason, we were allowed to send a couple of people, and it was everything we imagine being at the Oscars is like, except cooler - because instead of taking a selfie with a motley crew of vapid Hollywood stars, you get GeT_RiGhT and PaszaBiceps.

HLTV put on a hell of a show, with lights, cameras and action, and a glamourous, glistening pair of hosts that only made the whole thing feel important.

CS Esports has properly made it.

It’s a shame, in some ways, that the winners were often so obvious:

ZywOo winning AWPer of the Year

NiKo as Opener

And Nigma Galaxy as Women’s Team of the Year

…were all absolute shoo-ins.

At the end of it all, ZywOo ended up with three trophies. The aforementioned AWPer, the Highlight of the Year (which, in our unbiased opinion, should have gone to m0NESY) and the big boy, #1 Player of 2023.

It was, as many others, wholly unsurprising - but his comfortability on stage, speaking English and cracking jokes, was. He’s grown into a full blown superstar.

He was a fitting winner for the most Hollywood-esque event esports has ever seen.

Filling in at second was NiKo, with ropz at third. Both can be overjoyed with their years, but they’re simply not ZywOo. Nobody is, right now.